SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian espionage and disinformation campaigns have caused havoc across Europe. Russian opposition figures in Europe have been harassed and even killed, and officials have accused Moscow of sabotage attacks aimed at undermining support for Ukraine.
Great Britain retaliated in May, removing the diplomatic status of several official Russian properties in the U.K., heavily restricting Russian diplomatic visas, and expelling Russia’s defense attache for allegedly being an undeclared spy.
Cipher Brief expert Nick Fishwick, a former Senior Member of the British Foreign Office, has been closely watching how Russia is changing the rules of espionage – and war. In May, Fishwick wrote in The Cipher Brief that Moscow had shifted from Cold War-era intelligence operations focused on information gathering, and was now engaged in “a pattern of malign activity” intended to damage Western infrastructure, trade, and democratic processes. The Cold War-era “gentleman’s game” of spying has disappeared, Fishwick said. “The British (are) saying that the Russian gloves are off, that the Russians are fighting across a range of fronts and that an unusual response is required.”
Fishwick also believes the nature of war itself has changed, with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine a prime example. He spoke about all these issues with Cipher Brief CEO and Publisher Suzanne Kelly, for an episode of the State Secrets Podcast, under the same provocative heading as FIshwick chose for his article: “Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe.”
THE CONTEXT
- U.S. and European officials say recent acts of arson across Europe are part of a Russian sabotage campaign targeting support for Ukraine’s war effort.
- German authorities arrested two German-Russian nationals accused of plotting sabotage attacks against military facilities, including U.S. military bases.
- In May, NATO released a statement expressing deep concern about “recent malign activities” of Russia in Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the United Kingdom.
- Also in May, the U.K. stripped the diplomatic status of several Russian-owned properties in Britain and expelled Maxim Elovik, Russia’s defense attache, over “reckless and dangerous activities of the Russian government across Europe.”
- A Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine in a Mi-8 army helicopter last year was reportedly shot and run over by a car in Spain.
- Leonid Volkov, a close ally and top strategist of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was attacked in Lithuania’s capital of Vilnius. The attacker reportedly hit Volkov with a hammer several times and sprayed tear gas into his eyes.
THE INTERVIEW
The excerpt of this interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity. Listen to the full discussion on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Kelly: You wrote an article for The Cipher Brief that you titled, “Lamps are going out all over Europe” when it comes to Russian espionage. Tell me what that means.
Fishwick: There are one or two dimensions to it. Number one, I'm quoting from former British Foreign Secretary (Sir Edward Grey)'s famous phrase – famous in this country anyway – in 1914, when suddenly all these years of diplomacy and competitive rivalry between the UK and France on the one hand, and Germany and Austria on the other, suddenly that diplomacy and competitive rivalry turned into war. And Grey could see those lights turning out.
One aspect of the way I'm seeing this today is, it seems to me as if the lights are out in the relationship. I don't get a sense of there being things going on in the relationship between the West and Russia in terms of diplomacy, talks, friendship initiatives, soft diplomacy, anything like that. I'm seeing the lights going off. The normal business of a relationship, even between two blocs that don't like each other very much, as was the case between Britain and Germany before August 1914, we’re losing that, and I don't see any prospect of that resuming.
The second dimension to it is that what we're seeing now is something completely different from the way that war has been transacted in the past. And at the heart of this is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced the West to adopt new rules about what is a war and what is not a war.
When I say that we are at war now, I'm not saying that to alarm people. I don't see any prospects of Western forces with boots on the ground in Ukraine, let alone what would be normal signs of war between one country and the other. I don't see us launching air raids against Russian cities, God forbid. And I don't see the Russian Air Force launching attacks outside Ukraine, at least in the immediate future. I don't expect that to ever happen regarding the U.K. or the U.S.
But that doesn't mean we're not at war. It's just a different type of concept.
It's less bloody and it's less destructive in the short term, but it is war. We are in a weird kind of war that was signaled by the way the Russians invaded Ukraine – clearly an act of war, in February 2022 – and then tried to pretend that it wasn't an invasion at all. It was some kind of “special military operation,” a typical euphemistic Russian lie, I'm afraid.
Kelly: Poland has recently arrested people for links to alleged Russian sabotage. Norway is blocking access for most Russian tourists into their country. Estonia's prime minister feels very much the way you do – the prime minister is calling this a shadow war on the West. Is that what you think is happening right now?
Fishwick: Not quite, although I have massive admiration for the Estonian leader. I think the more we get away from old-fashioned spy terms like “shadow war,” the more we're likely to understand what's going on.
The Russians are clearly subverting the Western democratic processes as much as they possibly can. And this year they've got a lot of opportunity to do the most damage.
What the Russians are doing is trying to subvert, they're trying to destroy. They are funding and getting in and organizing sabotage operations. This is not just stealing a few documents from the Ministry of Defence, or stealing a vast amount of online data. It's subverting the West and it's trying to sabotage the West. Again, these are wartime activities and as I say, I've got massive respect for the Estonians, but I think “shadow war” is a bit too much of, Oh, it’s just like what was going on in the 1970s and the 80s when the KGB were there. It's a different thing.
They're aiming to destroy us. They're aiming to weaken us so much that we can't support Ukraine anymore. And I'm not saying that if we stop supporting Ukraine, then Russian tanks would roll straight into Tallinn or Warsaw or wherever. But I'm not saying that they wouldn't, either.
We can't give the Russians that freedom, that opportunity. So it's kind of “shadow,” but if you touch a shadow you don't touch anything. This is real.
Kelly: What’s your take on the recent elections across Europe, where the far right has been gaining a stronger foothold? How you think Russia may be playing into those elections?
Fishwick: Well, they are doing it. There's just no doubt whatsoever. Putting things online, discrediting people online, inventing bots online, all this kind of thing. They're absolutely doing that. There's no doubt whatsoever. How influential they are is a different question. But they're not doing it for fun. They're doing it because they think it's the most useful investment of time and resources that they can make to do what they want to do, which is to weaken the West. And to weaken the West, they'll pretty much support anybody.
20 years, 30 years ago, you wouldn’t have expected to see Russian state institutions supporting far-right parties and leaders. Now, they're definitely going to do that because far-right parties and leaders are a threat to the consensus that we in Western Europe, Eastern Europe as well, depend on to give us our common values and to fight for our common values. We can see in some countries in Europe that the tenacious holding to common values is not as solid as it is in other parts of Europe, and that creates a vulnerability.
If Russia could see more countries behaving as unpredictably as Hungary does, they'd think that was great. And they would see Hungary as an inspirational story for them. I hope that Hungary, through its own resilient democratic processes, comes through this. But it's a difficult actor for the rest of the European alliance to manage.
But there's no doubt (the Russians) are doing this stuff. How influential, we don't know. It's gotta be pretty influential or else they wouldn't be doing it.
Kelly; I'm wondering if a massive education campaign around disinformation, so that more people understand it and can identify it, will be needed.
Fishwick: I think yes. I'd add a note to cheer everybody up a bit, which is that I don't expect at the end of 2024, we're saying that we’ll have a far-right government in this country. There's no prospects of that whatsoever. And I can never see there being a far-right government in the U.K. in my lifetime. I just don't think that's going to happen.
OK, there've been some gains in the recent elections, but the French far right – it's not great, speaking personally, and I'm sure the Russians like it, but it's not the same as it was 10 years ago. For example, it's not consciously anti-Semitic. It was when (Marine) LePen’s father was running what was then called the French National Front. That's a genuine, not just cosmetic, toning down of serious far-right organizations to kind of tally with the values of the electorate.
Organizations like Action for Germany, which is worryingly strong, they’re still a long way from being able to form a government. And when you go to Germany and you talk to people, you find the predominant feeling from people is still pretty centrist. Even though the center parties are weaker than they were, the center is still holding reasonably well. So I just want to get that out there – don't let's panic and think that the center has been smashed by Russian covert operations.
But we will have to get more forthright in exposing what the Russians have been doing. The problem I see, and I'm speaking really as an old man in his 60s who wasn't brought up with social media: Social media makes it really difficult to get truths across, because most people who don't want to hear that won’t hear it. Social media has polarized debate and made it harder to get that kind of message over than it would have been, thirty or forty years ago.
Kelly: What do you make of Vladimir Putin's recent comments on whether he's willing and able to use nuclear weapons? It feels like the West is still on the fence about whether Putin would do something like that. How are you thinking about that particular threat?
Fishwick: I'm hesitant to make any predictions. If you ask me how I feel when Putin makes those threats, I just can't see him doing it.
I can't see that degree of escalation, even the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the ground in Ukraine. I just can't see how he can think that's in his interest, how that's a risk worth taking, how the benefits to Russia can possibly be worth what would follow on the escalation. Now, I'm not a crystal ball gazer, so I might be wrong, but I'm inclined to think you're just trying to scare us, and we should not be scared. And I think we should go on treating what's happening in Ukraine as a war and not be intimidated by this kind of talk.
So by all means, don't get into doing something that really might make it possible for Putin to do something like that. But I think he's only going to do something like that if we start talking about existential threats to Russia, not to Ukraine – then I can imagine him thinking, Right, now we really are going to escalate.
Before we get to that level, we should be aggressive in fighting this covert war and in supporting Kyiv to get the Russians as far out of Ukraine as we possibly can. I think it's all about stopping the Russian offensive, which, fortunately, looks as if it has stalled, at least in the north, and hopefully will stall further south as well. It's about trying to drive Russian forces back towards their own country so they occupy as little of Ukraine as possible. I think we can fight that pretty hard without it seeming to Putin as if he's facing an existential threat to his country.
Kelly: There’s a lot of head scratching over what a potential Trump administration might look like and how it might act toward Russia. We've seen a cozying up in the relationship between Trump and Putin during the last Trump administration. From a European perspective, how concerned are you about another potential Trump win and what that might mean for the United States' willingness to stand up against Russia aggressively, and really come to the aid of Europe?
Fishwick: I don't think America needs Europeans saying, It's terrible what might happen if Trump gets in and all that. I listen to this sort of stuff all the time in the U.K., at polite dinner parties. And I think there's a lot of ignorance about Trump and particularly about reasons why people vote for Trump.
I don't think America's gone mad. I think probably people support President Trump for completely reasonable factors, like their economic positions, their frustrations, like the fact American foreign policy — although I think they've actually done very well in the Middle East and very well in Ukraine - not everybody's going to like it. It's very complicated and doesn't seem to be offering any wins and people don't feel as vindicated by American foreign policies they might have done when, you know, Eisenhower was president.
To answer the question, having got the caveats out of the way, obviously what Europeans – well, Europeans like me – are worried about is that a Trump victory could be what Putin has been waiting for, given that he messed up what he thought he was going to achieve, which was a successful invasion of Kyiv in 2022. So I think it's a bit like, Is Mr. Trump going to bail him out, going to come to a deal? I've no idea whether that's going to happen.
My instinct is still, as it was in 2016, that if Trump does come in, I don't think it will be the end of NATO. I'm going to worry about it, but I don't think he will pull out of NATO. And I do also think that the intelligence relationships between the U.S. and Western European and other Western allies will remain strong.
I'm not panicking about it. And again, I'm terrible with crystal balls.
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