WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Russia is shifting from individual recruits to ‘professional’ networks to carry out a campaign of sabotage and other attacks across Europe, Poland’s internal security service said in a report published Wednesday.
European officials and law enforcement have previously warned that Russia is waging a hybrid war against Europe, including sabotage, arson attacks, and vandalism, as well as influence operations. The Associated Press has tracked more than 150 such incidents linked to Moscow by Western officials since the invasion of Ukraine.
Many of the people involved were recruited online as disposable agents and some had no idea they were working for Moscow. Russia is now moving away from using those low-cost, one-time recruits toward more “professional” operations, tapping into organized crime networks, according to the report published on Wednesday by the Internal Security Agency, or ABW.
Poland has conducted as many espionage investigations in the past two years as it did over the previous three decades, ABW said, noting that 62 people have been arrested.
Those espionage efforts are part of Russia’s “undeclared war with the Western world,” ABW said, in which “Russian intelligence is increasingly using methods typical of special forces (reconnaissance and sabotage).”
In 2024 and 2025, 69 espionage investigations were initiated, the same total number as between 1991 and 2023, ABW reported.
“The long-term goal of the Russian Federation remains the disintegration of Euro-Atlantic structures, the isolation of specific countries and their internal socio-political and economic destabilization,” the report stated. While Poland was primarily targeted by Russia, some of the espionage activities were also dictated by Belarus’ secret services, which are “closely cooperating” with Moscow, as well as by China.
The “mass surveillance” operations in Poland are meant to set the ground for acts of diversion, which ABW considers “the most serious challenge” it faces. Russian intelligence services, who are escalating their actions in Poland, are accepting the possibility of “occurrence of fatalities,” the Polish agency observed.
ABW also noted an increasing “professionalization” of Russian sabotage activities in 2024-2025. According to the agency, in 2023, Russian services were still basing their operations mainly on so-called one-time agents, recruited ad hoc via the internet. That is a model that Russia is thought to have expanded following the expulsion of its intelligence officers by Western European countries after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In 2024-2025, however, Russia placed greater emphasis on the creation of “complex sabotage cells” relying on “the closed structures of organized crime,” ABW noted.
“Russians prefer individuals with experience in law enforcement (e.g., former soldiers, police officers, mercenaries from the Wagner Group),” the report said.
ABW added that Russian services had also intensified training conducted on the territory of Russia itself, aimed at “professionally preparing agents for terrorist activities.”
In November 2025, Poland faced what Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an “unprecedented act of sabotage,” when explosions and other malfunctions on a section of railway line used for deliveries to Ukraine affected two trains, including a passenger train. There were no casualties.
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