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.”
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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.
Indeed. Long term unsustainable losses don’t matter that much to a homicidal dictator who gives exactly zero shits about the lives of his subjects.
As long as Putin thinks he can reach his goals before Russia runs out of population, he will keep going. He can still play the long game of a war of attrition, especially given how successful his psy-ops in western countries are. His divide and conquer approach is working. He always has at least one sycophant government in an EU country, blocking important decisions through abuse of the principle of unanimity. He did bolster the Brexit campaign all the way to success, he managed to install his deranged sock puppet in the White House for a second time (and potentially for good), and is successfully sowing dissent in the western alliances by bolstering far right ultranationalists in all sorts of countries. In most western countries, there is no organised counter to this, rather the established political caste is idiotically copying the rhetoric of the divisive far right populists (consisting of mostly lies) in order to (unsuccessfully) win back voters.
Putin only needs to make his war expensive enough for an increasingly divided West to lose interest. If he is allowed to conquer Ukraine, he will want to continue.