Kremlin bringing IS threat back to Europe

It is highly likely that an imitation will be launched of the Islamic State’s campaign to resume its operations across Europe. We expect terrorist attacks under the IS flag, which will in fact be masterminded by combat cells run by Russian intelligence on European soil. The goal is to shift public focus in Western democracies away from the ongoing war in Ukraine and onto the terrorist threat in Europe, prompting European leaders to renew cooperation with Moscow amid what would seem like a resurfaced immediate security challenge. Such operations may be scheduled for the period when Germany is hosting EURO 2024 and France – the Summer Olympics.

An orchestrated hostage situation in a Rostov penal facility in Russia, allegedly involving IS followers, suggests that the relevant scenario is now in the works. The incident, staged against the backdrop of an international conference on peace for Ukraine, hosted by Switzerland, brought the topic of ‘the Islamic State in Russia’ back into the media space. The Rostov incident was undoubtedly coordinated by Russian counterintelligence/intelligence since the security protocols in Russian prisons completely rules out a possibility of suspects/convicts getting hold of any paraphernalia of banned organizations, such as the Islamic State, let alone lethal weapons.

At the same time, cases are widely known where Russian authorities force their own citizens, residents of the Kavkaz region, to commit violent crimes by threatening to hurt their families.

According to the Kremlin plot, terrorist threats inside Russia should turn it from an aggressor waging a war of annihilation in Ukraine into a victim of international terrorism. Recently, an ethnic Chechen man was detained in France after the police learned he had been planning to set off a bomb at the Paris Games. Thus, we are seeing Russia systemically working to imitate an Islamic State resurgence in in Europe. Against this background, tensions are brewing on the Belarus-Poland border, where Moscow and Minsk keep trying to infiltrate refugees from Africa and the Middle East into Europe as part of a wider campaign to meddle in the election results across the EU. 

This way Moscow is trying to boost public support for friendly far-right forces in Europe and persuade governments in the region to tighten policies toward refugees, at the same time reducing social assistance to migrants, including displaced Ukrainians. At the same time, according to our data, Russia is building up in Libya a hub for the transfer of migrants from North Africa to Southern Europe.

Russian intelligence appears to have faced a creative crisis in operational planning, being forced to return to the schemes applied back in 2015-2016, when a series of terrorist attacks rocked Paris, Berlin, and Brussels with the active assistance of Russian spy network across the EU. The expulsion of Moscow’s operatives acting under diplomatic cover after the outbreak of war with Ukraine sharply reduced terrorist activity in Europe, despite the fact that European security bodies shifted their focus away from the threat of Islamic radicals to that coming from Russia. This confirms our previous findings about Moscow being engaged with, as well as exploiting and coordinating terrorist organizations in the West. This conclusion is shared in a CIA report on the use of terrorist organizations by the Soviet Union during the Cold War era.