The Polish Interior Ministry announced an emergency meeting of the authorities for today at the Counter-Terrorism Center of the Internal Security Agency (ABW), following the police receiving information on possible assassination attempts against Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz.
"Following information received from the police regarding a possible assassination attempt against the Prime Minister, as well as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense, the Minister of the Interior and the Coordinating Minister of Special Services have ordered the initiation of measures in this regard," Interior Ministry spokeswoman Karolina Galecka wrote in X.
Meanwhile, Moscow is reportedly stepping up its efforts to assassinate European defense officials. It is the alarm raised by Western intelligence agencies that has prompted companies to increase security measures around their high-level executives.
Assassinations of European civilian targets - once considered taboo even by Russian spy agencies - are playing an increasingly prominent role in these plans. According to the Financial Times, which spoke to officials from five different intelligence agencies, CEOs and other high-level employees have become targets of Kremlin agents.
According to sources, executives of smaller companies are also targeted, especially those of companies involved in the production of drones or their components.
"The threat level in Europe has increased. To property, but also to people," a senior official said.
Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), has significantly stepped up contacts with "staff and managers" of German defense companies, going so far as to recommend the use of private protection teams, an official said.
Several defense industry executives told the FT that they had strengthened their close protection measures over the past six months, on the specific recommendation of government security services. Others say they only take such measures when traveling abroad.
Responsibility for these types of plots, defined in Russian intelligence jargon as 'wet work' - an expression that indicates violent operations, in particular contract killings - falls largely on the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service.
And, according to 007, the Gru is adapting its methods. Its officers work ever more closely with organized crime groups, use networks of agents who operate across national borders, and divide reconnaissance, logistics, planning and execution tasks between different cells or individuals, rather than relying on individual “expendable” agents recruited online in exchange for money.
In some cases, plots already in the operational phase have been identified and foiled. In others, suspicious activities were detected, including forms of surveillance aimed at reconstructing people's daily habits, both at their homes and in their workplaces.
Security officials have stressed that a central element of the Russian strategy is that assassination attempts do not necessarily have to be completed for the campaign to produce the desired effects.
“From the Russian point of view, the main objective remains psychological,” an intelligence official said. "It is enough to make people believe that they could become a target to achieve the desired effect. They want individuals to think twice before doing business with Ukraine."
According to informed sources that ANSA has been able to contact, no specific alarm on what was reported by the Financial Times regarding Russia's plans to assassinate European security officials has ever reached any channel of communication between states, diplomatic, military or intelligence.
What is described by the newspaper, the same sources note, is the result of generic alerts on possible scenarios which have never been underestimated since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, over four years.
