Russia is shifting from individual recruits to professional networks to carry out sabotage and other attacks across Europe, Poland's internal security service said in a report published Wednesday. The report lays out a grim little lesson in how state power mutates: disposable online recruits, organized crime links, and intelligence services treating people as tools in an undeclared war.
Who Gets Used
The report said many of the people involved were recruited online as disposable agents and some had no idea they were working for Moscow, but Russia is now moving away from those low-cost, one-time recruits toward more professional operations that tap into organized crime networks. That is the machinery at work: people pulled in through the internet, used up, and replaced by tighter structures when the old method gets too crude.
The Associated Press said it has tracked more than 150 such incidents linked to Moscow by Western officials since the invasion of Ukraine. The scale matters because it shows this is not a one-off stunt but a sustained pattern of sabotage and covert pressure spread across Europe. The people living near rail lines, infrastructure, and public spaces are the ones left to absorb the risk.
Poland's Internal Security Agency, or ABW, said Poland has conducted as many espionage investigations in the past two years as it did over the previous three decades, and said 62 people have been arrested. The numbers point to a state security apparatus in overdrive, with arrests and investigations becoming the normal response to a widening shadow war.
What the Security State Says
ABW said those espionage efforts are part of Russia's "undeclared war with the Western world," in which "Russian intelligence is increasingly using methods typical of special forces (reconnaissance and sabotage)." The agency framed the conflict in the language of war, and the report said 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.
It said some of the espionage activities were also dictated by Belarus' secret services, which are "closely cooperating" with Moscow, as well as by China. The report places multiple state actors in the same field of covert pressure, each using intelligence services as instruments of control and disruption.
ABW said the "mass surveillance" operations in Poland are meant to set the ground for acts of diversion, which it considers "the most serious challenge" it faces, and said Russian intelligence services are accepting the possibility of "occurrence of fatalities." That is the language of the security apparatus describing a world where surveillance is not an abstract concern but preparation for sabotage and possible death.
The agency said that in 2024 and 2025, 69 espionage investigations were initiated, the same total number as between 1991 and 2023. The pace of investigations has accelerated into a new normal, with two years matching three decades of earlier cases.
From Disposable Agents to Closed Cells
ABW said that in 2023 Russian services were still basing their operations mainly on so-called one-time agents recruited ad hoc via the internet, but in 2024-2025 Russia placed greater emphasis on the creation of "complex sabotage cells" relying on "the closed structures of organized crime." The shift is from loose, cheap recruitment to hardened networks, a move toward more durable forms of clandestine power.
ABW said, "Russians prefer individuals with experience in law enforcement (e.g., former soldiers, police officers, mercenaries from the Wagner Group)," and added that Russian services had intensified training conducted on the territory of Russia itself, aimed at "professionally preparing agents for terrorist activities." The report ties the sabotage apparatus to people already trained inside coercive institutions, then retrained for covert operations.
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. Even without deaths, the incident shows how infrastructure becomes a target in these state-to-state struggles, with ordinary passengers and logistics caught in the blast radius.
The AP article was by Claudia Ciobanu. The report leaves no room for comfort: intelligence services, organized crime, surveillance, arrests, and sabotage are all moving pieces in a conflict that is being waged over people who did not choose it.