“We are at war with Putin”, declared German health minister Karl Lauterbach this month. His remark caused consternation among his colleagues in government. But he’s right. Spies, hackers and mysterious saboteurs are attacking critical infrastructure around the country — and the most likely culprits are the Russians. For the first time in decades, Germans are confronting a major challenge to their national security. How will they adapt?
This month, an act of sabotage forced state-owned rail giant Deutsche Bahn to suspend all train traffic for nearly three hours across the country’s north, leaving passengers stranded. The sophistication of the attack, in which assailants simultaneously cut two sets of fiber-optic cables about 340 miles apart from each other, prompted some officials to speculate that a foreign government might be involved. It should come as little surprise that many suspect Moscow is responsible. The breakdown also revealed that there is a surprising amount of sensitive information about the rail network freely available online, heightening concerns about poor security.
Cyberattacks on the state and businesses have also been intensifying. In recent months, hospitals, fuel distribution networks and government websites have reported incidents. IT expert Benjamin Mejri has warned that many of the attacks are focusing on critical infrastructure, such as power, water and gas distribution; the war in Ukraine, he says, is suddenly laying bare long-standing failures in cybersecurity. Things have gotten so bad that last week the government fired its cybersecurity chief over concerns that he has close ties to Russia.
The Bundeswehr, the German army, has spotted unauthorized drones surveilling bases where Ukrainian soldiers are reportedly being trained in the use of armored vehicles that Germany is sending to Ukraine. Again, links to Russia are hard to substantiate. Yet there’s a striking parallel to similar cases in Norway, where the authorities have just arrested seven Russians for flying drones or taking pictures near sensitive areas.
Meanwhile, European officials are still trying to get to the bottom of last month’s mysterious attacks on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that run from Russia to Germany. Danish and Swedish experts who have investigated the sites suggest that they were caused by “powerful explosions”, and the case is now being investigated as an act of gross sabotage. Of course, Russia was quick to point fingers at the West, claiming that the leaks were caused by an “act of international terrorism” that set a “dangerous precedent”. Moscow’s propagandists have been busily generating reams of disinformation blaming the United States for the blasts.
Yet it’s Russia that clearly benefits from the blasts. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying to pressure the Europeans into reducing their support for Ukraine, and he hopes that the doubts sown by the explosions will add to the mounting political tensions in the West. Russia had already disrupted, and then systematically scaled down, the gas flow through Nord Stream 1 for months until shutting it down completely in August. The undersea attacks have now succeeded in indefinitely suspending the start of operations for Nord Stream 2. The loss of supply has sent European gas prices shooting up just as the market had calmed somewhat because of reports of above-average storage levels for the winter.Even though gas prices have recently dipped due to a sudden surge in supply, that is likely to have little effect on prices for electricity, only 15 percent of which is produced from gas.
Germany is particularly vulnerable to such attacks. Its electricity costs have long ranked among the highest in the world but have reached new records in recent months; consumers are already paying 30 to 60 percent more than before the war, and prices are projected to rise by another 60 percent next year. Talk of nationwide blackouts has heightened the sense of crisis. According to a recent survey, more than two-thirds of Germans are concerned about the rising cost of living, and nearly 60 percent worry that they might not be able to pay their rent and mortgages anymore. More than two-thirds of Germans are dissatisfied with the work of the government.
Russia has both means and motive to ratchet up the pain. A comprehensive report by Spiegel magazine revealed that Germany has been a major target for Russian spies in recent years. Moscow’s methods have included state-sanctioned assassinations on German soil, such as the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in a Berlin park in 2019.
Bundeswehr general Carsten Breuer warns that “every substation, every power plant, every pipeline can be attacked”. Russian influence reaches deep into the German economy. Over the years, the Russians have bought major shares in Germany’s state-owned energy infrastructure, such as a critical oil refinery in the city of Schwedt.
Berlin has shrugged off security concerns for far too long. The general sense of relief at the end of the Cold War led to a downscaling of both internal and external security, says Green politician and secret service expert Konstantin von Notz: “We were complacent and didn’t care about the details”.
Germany now needs to act quickly. While parliament has launched a welcome debate about security for critical infrastructure, results are slow in coming. With Russia smarting from its defeats in Ukraine and Europe heading into a difficult winter, Putin has little to lose and much to gain from attacks on critical targets in Western countries.
Putin is fighting his war against Ukraine on German soil, too. The sooner Berlin wakes up to this fact, the better.
Katja Hoyer, an Anglo-German historian and journalist, is the author of Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918.