On 1 September 2026, the German federal government attributed to the Russian Federation an attempted sabotage using unmanned aerial vehicles at Leipzig Airport. According to assessments by Germany’s interior and foreign ministers, as well as the police investigation, the nature of the means employed and the available intelligence indicate actions carried out in the interests of Russian state structures. The target was logistics infrastructure linked to supplies in support of Ukraine.
In response, Berlin announced the closure of the Russian Federation’s consulate general in Bonn, the termination of the agreement governing the activities of the “Russian House” in Berlin, the summoning of the Russian ambassador, and tighter controls on the entry of Russian citizens. The Russian side rejected the accusations without offering a substantive rebuttal of the circumstances established by German authorities, accompanying its reaction with threatening rhetoric directed at Germany’s industrial and defense potential.
On the same day, 1 September, improvised explosive devices were discovered in Brandenburg near a substation in the area of the Jänschwalde thermal power plant. On the morning of 2 September, an explosion of an unidentified object occurred near Augsburg’s main railway station, injuring civilians and damaging property. These episodes remain under investigation and have not yet received an official attribution. Their temporal coincidence with the political escalation, however, requires that the situation be assessed as a whole rather than as a collection of unrelated everyday incidents.
Since 2022, competent authorities of European Union and NATO states have recorded an expansion of Russian activity in the so-called gray zone. This refers to a complex of actions deliberately kept below the threshold that would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty, yet aimed at inflicting political, economic, and psychological damage.
That complex includes cyberattacks attributed to groupings of Russian military intelligence, including APT28; information-psychological campaigns, among them Storm-1516 and “matryoshka”-type operations designed to discredit democratic institutions and centrist parties; attacks on logistics chains; damage to critical infrastructure, including undersea communications in the Baltic Sea; the use of unmanned systems for reconnaissance and sabotage; and the recruitment of low-level executors through closed communications channels.
German security authorities have previously indicated that Russian services increasingly rely on intermediaries and so-called low-level agents. This method provides deniability for the commissioning state and makes it harder to bring official charges against the real principal. That is why Moscow’s public position has remained unchanged for years: every exposure is declared a provocation, every investigation Russophobia, every protective measure an escalation.
This approach is not an improvisation of 2026. It reproduces a practice already applied against other European states: pressure on critical infrastructure, the creation of an atmosphere of vulnerability, testing of allies’ reactions, and an attempt to undermine support for Ukraine without opening a direct military front against a NATO country.
The electoral calendar is of particular importance in the German context. On 6 September 2026, elections will be held for the Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt; on 20 September, elections will take place in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin. According to opinion polls, Alternative for Germany retains leading positions in the eastern Länder and aspires to form a state government. At the federal level the party consistently ranks among the top contenders and advocates a revision of energy and sanctions policy toward the Russian Federation.
For Moscow, this conjunction has strategic value. The Federal Republic of Germany is the leading economy of the European Union and a key European hub of military-technical and logistical support for Ukraine. Weakening the internal consensus in Germany could impede the formulation of a common European line, deepen divisions in the Council of the EU, and create a precedent for political normalization of relations with an aggressor state.
This does not require asserting that Alternative for Germany acts on direct instructions from foreign intelligence services. It is sufficient to note an objective coincidence of interests: growing public anxiety over infrastructure security and the cost of supporting Ukraine strengthens political forces that demand a rollback of Berlin’s current course. The Russian side has traditionally used such forces as relays for advantageous narratives without assuming formal responsibility for their activity.
Available assessments by European intelligence services allow a working hypothesis about intent to be formulated. The Russian Federation currently shows no readiness for open military escalation against a NATO member state. Instead, it continues to bet on limited damage, high frequency of incidents, and informational ambiguity.
Preferred instruments in this model are expendable executors, intermediary chains, individuals acting from mercenary, ideological, or protest motives, and information networks that spread the version of “staged actions” by Western governments. The task is not to inflict maximum losses, but to undermine confidence in the state’s ability to provide security and to shift public debate from the question of external aggression to the question of the authorities’ internal incapacity.
This line directly contradicts Moscow’s claims that its policy is purely defensive. Practice in Europe in recent years demonstrates the opposite: hybrid operations expanded as European states delayed official attributions and confined themselves to diplomatic notes.
The German government’s official statement of 1 September should be regarded as recognition of the systemic character of the threat, not as a reaction to a single technical incident. The combination of cyberattacks, campaigns of interference in the information space, encroachments on logistics and critical infrastructure, and the use of executors with no formal affiliation to Russian state organs constitutes a durable method of struggle against European unity.
For the Kremlin, the optimal outcome of Germany’s September political cycle would not be a military clash, but the fragmentation of public support for a policy of containing the Russian Federation. Such an outcome would have consequences beyond Germany, given the country’s role in the economy and politics of the European Union.
It should be emphasized that a legally completed body of evidence on all the September episodes has not yet been published. That circumstance does not, however, cancel the political and operational assessment. Europe’s experience since 2022 shows that waiting for absolute public proof of every link in the chain is used by the Russian Federation as time for the next operation. That is the essence of the gray zone: the commissioning state retains the ability to deny involvement for as long as the cost of denial remains lower for it than the cost of deterrence.