The chief of Germany’s foreign intelligence service warned that his agency has “concrete” evidence that Russia is planning an attack on Nato territory.
Bruno Kahl, the outgoing head of Germany’s federal intelligence service (BND), said in a rare interview that Russian leadership no longer believes Nato’s article 5 guarantee of mutual assistance will be honoured — and may seek to test it.
“We are very sure, and we have intelligence evidence to back this up, that [Russia’s full-scale invasion of] Ukraine is only one step on Russia’s path towards the west,” he told a podcast of German outlet Table Briefings.
Kahl qualified that “this doesn’t mean that we expect large tank battalions to roll from the east to the west.”
Kahl said: “We see that Nato is supposed to be tested in its mutual assistance promise. There are people in Moscow who don’t believe that Nato’s article 5 still works.”
[…]
While the war is still confined to Ukrainian territory, the German internal secret service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has warned that Moscow is increasingly extending the conflict to western countries through cyberwarfare and espionage.
Russia has in particular taken to deploying so-called low-level agents to commit acts of sabotage, according to the BfV annual report, which was presented in Berlin on Wednesday. They are believed to have been deployed to plant incendiary devices in parcels, which caused a series of fires in European logistics hubs last year.
“We have noticed that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has led to our cyber and espionage defences being increasingly tested,” Sinan Selim, vice-president of the BfV, said.
Which is why Europe needs to coordinate on a joint military plan YESTERDAY. EU is capable of keeping Russia at bay on its own, no doubt about it, but they need to get smart about it as soon as possible because we only have a small window of time to pre-empt this.
The problem is that, while the EU has undeniably grown more cohesive and rational, it’s still just “a bunch of countries at the same party,” or at least that’s what it feels like. Putin knows this. Everyone knows this, but few can afford to actually talk about it and risk spoiling the image.
I do agree that we need to present a unified front on this and show that asshole that he can’t swing his weenus wherever he pleases (which, arguably, should’ve been done years ago, but WHATEVER!), but I somehow get the feeling nothing will happen until he actually does something. As though those “oopsies” drones which landed everywhere but Ukraine weren’t enough as-is…
Edit: and if he does do something and we continue wringing our hands figuring out a balanced approach, then we’re fucked.
It is just one point of view based on the limited information. If you check actions of core EU countries, you can see that they are cohesive + joint military exercise are happening quite often.
Said it yourself, “core.” That just means a couple of people at said party know each other pretty well, but there are still more people there.