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.
Putin will do a small attack that involves plausible deniability or doesn’t trigger an Article 5 response, then push that a little more later on. He might even deny that it was Russia or he might even use foreign troops to muddy the attack. He is testing NATO.
Still, what exactly does a game of ever increasing “poke the bear” achieve, given the massive risk that the bear gets angry and properly fucks them up?
Russia getting away with it … until they don’t … is a pretty likely outcome, but the point were they stop getting away with it is almost certainly at or short of territorial invasion, which means that all their getting away with it until reaching that point will have delivered them no concrete gains - it would all be provocation for the sake of provocation until the moment they get mauled.
US forces have already been shot at by Wagner group in Syria
and they got pulverized in response
I have a hard time believing that was anything more than complete incompetence on Russia’s part. Wagner starts a firefight with mixed American and Syrian resistance fighters, to which the US responds by calling the Kremlin to ask if Wagner are acting on orders from them. Russia tells the US that Wagner are not under direct orders from them and to deal with them as they see fit, and Wagner proceeds to get their ass kicked like they usually do. To me that reads a lot more like the usual Kremlin incompetence than any sort of planned provocation