“This is a very dangerous phase of escalation and we should address it really seriously because we are minutes from big casualties here,” said Budrys, who will present his concerns his counterparts at Thursday’s Foreign Affairs Council. “If it would be successful, these operations, this sabotage that was conducted in Poland, we would be talking in a different environment, with dead people as a consequence.”
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski will give ministers an update during the session in Brussels, as an investigation gets underway into the suspected railway sabotage. Warsaw said Tuesday that military-grade C-4 explosives had been used in what appeared to be an unsuccessful attempt to derail a train and film the ensuing carnage. It suspects two Ukrainian nationals working for Russia who have fled to Belarus.
Despite the Polish incident, Budrys said the scope of the Kremlin’s actions is far wider. “Everyone thinks that on the eastern front line it is always more intense — it is not — when you count the real cases of sabotage elsewhere in continental Europe, there were more than there were in the Baltics and in Poland.”
Suspicious drones have been reported across the EU, sparking alerts from Copenhagen to Belgium, while hundreds of incidents have been probed as potential efforts to destabilize countries and intimidate the public.
Globsec, a Prague-based think tank, calculated there were more than 110 acts of sabotage and attempted attacks carried out in Europe between January and July, mainly in Poland and France, by people with links to Russia.
Speaking on Wednesday, the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said: “Russia is trying to do two things: On one hand to test us, to see how far they can go … And next they also try to sow fear within our society.”