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The European Union and the UK have announced coordinated sanctions against Russia after accusing Moscow’s FSB intelligence agency of carrying out a cyber attack in December targeting Poland’s energy grid and orchestrating a wider campaign of digital sabotage across Europe.
The joint measures focus on individuals and organisations linked to Russia’s security services, with the EU imposing sanctions on nine people and four entities, while Britain added 24 names to its sanctions list.
The UK government said the package – the first joint cyber sanctions announced with the EU – was aimed at “the Russian state’s persistent and increasingly reckless attempts to sow chaos and division across Europe”.
The EU said countries including France, Germany, Poland, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Romania and Finland had been targeted in a cyber campaign stretching back years.
The attempted attack on Poland’s critical infrastructure in the winter of 2025, including its electricity grid, has been attributed to the FSB’s Centre 16 intelligence unit.
“This reckless attack failed but could have caused 500,000 citizens to lose electricity in the depths of winter,” the Foreign Office in London said. “It is another example of the Russian state’s irresponsible attempts to sow chaos across Europe.”
Criminals doing Moscow’s “dirty work”
The Foreign Office said Russia’s intelligence agencies had increasingly turned to cybercriminals to support the Kremlin’s military and foreign policy objectives as the war in Ukraine continued.
It said the activity showed Russia was using criminal networks “to do its dirty work.”
UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “These sanctions strike at the core of the cybercriminal networks propping up the Russian state’s aggression, and the UK and EU are sending a clear message that Russia cannot hide behind its use of these proxy groups.”
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the Russian ambassador would be summoned in the coming days over what he described as a “vast cyber campaign”. He said attacks had targeted government ministries, companies and service operators in multiple European countries with the aim of gathering intelligence or disrupting critical infrastructure, including rail networks in Poland.
The FSB’s Centre 16 has previously been accused by Western intelligence agencies of using malware over several decades to conduct espionage operations around the world.
A claim that has been consistently denied by Moscow.
Additional sources • AFP