Perspective from Estonia: it was funny. I know that GRU does things which are far from funny, but this case was a comic failure.
According to the sentence, some GRU branch hired a local fan of the Kremlin, who hired an ex-cop with links to organized crime, who hired one subcontractor, who hired another subcontractor, who finally paid some clueless guy to do the job: kick in the window of the interior minister’s private car (a newspaper editor’s car was also targeted).
In doing so, they spent 10 000 euros. To kick in two car windows. While leaking streams of data due to involving a chain of subcontractors, and getting caught. That’s ridiculously inefficient. I’m surprised at how they’re able to actually carry out sabotage at this level of clumsiness. Perhaps their netork in Estonia is simply very shoddy.
Meanwhile, if you gave an anarchist in Russia 10 000 euros (no instructions, anarchists don’t take instructions) you could feasibly expect something important to burn down.
P.S.
Non-paywalled source: English edition of Estonian public broadcaster ERR:
Setting aside efficiency, I really don’t get this whole “pay criminals to engage in sabotage” campaign in Europe that Russian intelligence has going.
The actual acts don’t cause that much damage. It’s not hamstringing countries.
If it can’t be linked to Russia, then it seems unlikely that it has much deterrent power. Russia can’t say “do things I don’t like, and we’ll do more of this”.
If it can be traced to Russia, then the elaborate string of subterfuge doesn’t seem to have a point.
And stuff that can be attributed to Russia is an escalation that the other country knows about. Escalating with NATO, even in limited ways, seems to me like a losing game for Russia. Russia’s best hope from NATO is disinterest, not winning a “who inflicts more pain” game.
Maybe the idea is to artificially create the impression of unrest or disagreement with the government, but that seems questionable at this scale. I mean, would some of these even have made news had they not been traced back to Russian intelligence? If they could instigate widespread riots or something like that, okay, that might be different, but…
EDIT: It might be trying to find a form of asymmetric warfare, which the article mentions. I can easily believe that Estonian intelligence and law enforcement expended more then 10k EUR in resources investigating your window-kicking incident that cost Russia 10k EUR. But…Russia trying to drain resources in NATO seems impractical too. It’s too-large a pool to reasonably drain, and even more so with the scale of this campaign.
