This is Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland:
Dear allies, the investigation of the Lithuanian prosecutor’s office has confirmed our suspicions that [those] responsible for setting fires to shopping centres in Vilnius and Warsaw are [linked with] the Russian secret services.
Good to know before negotiations.
Such is the nature of this state. [1]
This is based on a claim by Lithuanian intelligence that fires in Lithuanian and Warsaw are linked to Russian secret services. The claim is that an “underage” person i.e. a teenager was recruited by Russian intelligence to start fires.
I can’t assess this claim. I am certainly willing to believe it is true. Why do I say taking Tusk to task? Because I am sure that Ukrainian intelligence is doing something very similar; quite possibly on a much larger scale; recruiting teenagers online to carry out acts of sabotage in Russia. What are my grounds for saying this:
- I would expect them to be doing this. There are obviously recruiting marginal people to carry out high-level ‘terrorist’ (in the Russian version) attacks – such as the nationalist blogger who was blown up with a statue of himself in St. Petersburg or the General blown up by an immigrant worker in Moscow.
- In VK I have seen what looks like a government sponsored messaged aimed at teenagers – on the site of a special needs school whose account I follow. The message reminds them that arson of public facilities is treated by the courts as sabotage and you will get a very long sentence; it is not an easy way of earning money. You could say that these messages are being produced for propaganda reasons, but I don’t find that convincing; these are internal messages probably not being seen by the public outside of Russia. I suspect they are real. At least the school which is telling their LD pupils about this is taking the risk seriously. They believe that there are people recruiting teenagers online to carry out sabotage acts.
- A while ago there were a spate of articles in the liberal press about ‘mysterious’ sabotage acts especially on railways in Russia. The suggestion was that these were some kind of ‘opposition’ groups. My guess is that this was messaging created by Ukrainian intelligence and fed to their puppets in the liberal Western media, to accompany their operations. (Strangely, all my Google searches turn up articles about Russian ‘sabotage’ in Europe!) [It is characteristic of Ukrainian intelligence operations that they are ‘double-forked’. Here there are two wins; sabotage in Russia and gullible Western leaders believing that this is being done by brave Russians ‘fighting the dictatorship’.]
Note: this is an article from RFE about ‘Kazaks arrested in Moscow for railway sabotage’. Who paid them?
This is an article about Western darling (and looter of Russian state assets [2]) Mikhail Khodorkovsky explicitly calling for acts of infrastructure sabotage in Russia.
This is a link in Western backed Russian banned outlet Meduza. It speaks of dozens of acts of railway sabotage. I can’t read the article; are they attributed to brave Russians spontaneously rising up to overthrow the ‘dictatorship’?
In other words; you get what you wish for. When Tusk says that “Such is the nature of this state” is is just making a total fool of himself. What about the state which he is backing?
Notes
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/mar/17/russia-us-ukraine-donald-trump-vladimir-putin-volodymyr-zelenskyy-ceasefire-peace-talks-europe-latest-live-news?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with%3Ablock-67d80c818f08053850a26113#block-67d80c818f08053850a26113
- For example, Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s bank Menatep acquired Yukos oil (valued at 7 to 10 billion dollars) for a mere 159 million dollars, paving the way for Khodorkovskii to amass fabulous wealth and become the richest man in Russia. All sixteen ‘auctions’ followed the same insider pattern. Yeltsin’s government portrayed the transactions as legitimate ‘privatization’ (privatizatsiia), but observers aptly described it as ‘grabization’ (prikhvatizatsiia). The giveaways enriched the insider but not the state; this ‘fire sale of the century’ failed to generate the vast revenues that it had anticipated. Freeze, Gregory L.. Russia: A History (p. 473). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition. (Freeze is absolutely not some kind of “Putin apologist”).