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.
This makes no sense unless Russian leadership is getting desperate (which they may well be I suppose). They’ve lost over a million people just trying to invade Ukraine. Opening up a second front with a well trained new enemy just seems unwise in the extreme. It would be like fighting a baby elephant and messing that up so deciding to fight the enraged elephant’s Mum as well.
Putin is only getting desperate about keeping his economy afloat, and for that to happen, he has to engage in more conflicts than just the Ukraine genocide. Reports show that he has been transitioning his economy into a more wartime economy, and has been doing so for at least a decade now. Just listen to the defense ministers of the neighbouring nations like the baltic states and finland. They know very well what will come sooner or later, a russian war machine fueled by the indoctrinated hate for the west and a necessity to keep fighting, or risk dying as an empire.
Not a second front. Just a small scale attack to see how they react. It might just be a single missile or a bunch of drones.
For Russia maybe, but it won’t be a small scale attack from NATO.
They’ll push through to Moscow or until pootin is dead.