Is Russia winning its hybrid war against Germany?

Photo by 4zyxxn on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

The first thing to say about Swiftair Flight 5960, the cargo jet that was supposed to land in Vilnius after taking off from Leipzig Airport on Monday morning, is that we don’t yet have definitive answers on why it crashed.

We know that the Boeing-built jet hit the ground a kilometre short of the runway, and that it erupted in a fireball seconds later. Miraculously, three of the four crew members survived.

Why it crashed in normal conditions remains a mystery... at least publicly.

German investigators have now been sent to Vilnius to assist their Lithuanian colleagues in the investigation.

However, it is already apparent that the German defence establishment suspects foul play — an assessment that reflects Germany’s changing role in the world, as Berlin increasingly views incidents that once would have been treated as isolated accidents through the prism of confrontation, deterrence, and hybrid conflict.

Carsten Breuer, head of the German armed forces, said on Tuesday that the crash “fits into a pattern” of previous Russian sabotage attempts.

He was referring to a package that caught fire at Leipzig Airport, the main cargo hub for central Europe, after arriving in a shipment from Vilnius in July. German intelligence suspect that Kremlin agents sent the package. In October they issued an unusually specific warning that Russia is planning to target air cargo as part of an escalating shadow war against Europe.

Olaf Scholz, a man who chooses his words very carefully, said this week that it “could be the case” that Russia was behind the plane crash. Coming from Scholz, those four words are a lot less equivocal than they appear.

How could the Russians have brought the plane down?

Aviation authorities in the Baltic region have been warning for months about GPS blocking from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which lies between Lithuania and Poland. This practice knocks out the main navigation system that pilots use during flight.

Flight 5960 flew within a few kilometres of Kaliningrad on its way to Vilnius; real time flight data shows its GPS data disappearing near Kaliningrad before returning shortly afterwards.

On the ground in Lithuania, authorities are looking at whether an issue with the runway landing system caused the accident. Later on Monday, a Polish aircraft spent hours in the air testing the runway’s Instrument Landing System (ILS), a guidance tool that helps planes to land at night.

According to Harshad Sathaye, a researcher at ETH Zürich who has published work on the vulnerability of ILS to sabotage attacks, it is feasible that someone managed to override the system to confuse the pilot.

“A sufficiently equipped and motivated adversary in theory could cause such issues, but I can’t say for certain,” he told me.

Sathaye pointed out that the pilot had other gauges, such as an altimeter, that should have warned him that he was flying too low. The crash was probably caused by on-board equipment failure “since implementing such attacks is not that straightforward,” was his initial conclusion. He added that analysis of the aircraft’s black box and GPS data should provide definite answers.

Clearly, there could be a more innocent explanation for the crash. What is also obvious, though, is that Russia has both the motive and the track record to make sabotage seem all too plausible.

This would mark the first time that Russian agents deliberately killed a western civilian on western soil - it would be a major escalation in a hybrid war against the countries who are supporting Ukraine.

But it is far from an isolated incident.

German intelligence officials warn that Moscow has long since decided we are its enemy, and hybrid warfare - incidents below the threshold of a declaration of war - are its preferred method.

The aim of these attacks? To increase fear among the public that the war is escalating, and to erode support for Ukraine.

“Whether we want it or not, we are in a direct confrontation with Russia. Putin decided long ago that we are his enemy,” Bruno Kahl, head of the BND, Germany foreign intelligence service, told the Bundestag earlier this year.

What’s more, Germany is one of Putin's central targets.

“The Kremlin sees Germany as a key decision-maker in the EU and NATO when it comes to weapons supplies and sanctions. At the same time it sees Germany as easy prey. This combination of influence and weakness makes us the ideal target,” Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, a former senior BND official, told Der Spiegel in October.

Why does Russia see Germany as so vulnerable? Firstly, because it has some of the weakest counter-espionage capabilities in the West, making it easy to penetrate. Secondly, because the German public are seen as susceptible to both intimidation and defeatism.