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Western intelligence warns the Kremlin is deploying organized crime networks to physically eliminate executives arming Ukraine.
European intelligence services have told the heads of defense companies across the continent that they are now in the crosshairs of a widening Kremlin campaign to physically eliminate those arming Ukraine.
The scope has broadened beyond small drone manufacturers to CEOs and senior managers at major arms firms, The Financial Times reports, citing five Western intelligence sources.
The reporting attributes the planning to Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU.
Recruiting from organized crime
Officials describe a shift in method: agents increasingly recruit from organized crime networks, operate in cells spread across borders, and split reconnaissance, logistics, and execution between different hands so no single arrest unravels the operation.
Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service now considers the GRU the most dangerous foreign-service threat, which has moved past online recruitment toward structured operations with surveillance of daily routines.
From one CEO to an industry
Executives at Europe’s largest arms makers have been on heightened alert since 2024, when US and German services uncovered a plot to kill Armin Papperger, chief executive of German manufacturer Rheinmetall.
NATO’s James Appathurai publicly confirmed the plot in January 2025, placing it alongside train derailments, arson, and attacks on politicians’ property as part of a single Russian sabotage drive on NATO territory.
This August, Swedish authorities detained a Russian couple camped near a property linked to Saab chief executive Micael Johansson, whose company is selling Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine.
The woman had walked onto the grounds asking to fish from a private pier before being turned away. Johansson is under personal protection and called the guards’ response routine.
The psychological aim
Sinan Selen, a senior official at Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), told lawmakers that “Russia is deliberately planning acts of violence against individuals, using state actors or state-controlled entities.”
Officials interviewed by the Financial Times say physical elimination is only part of Moscow’s calculation.
One intelligence official put the deeper goal plainly: “The main goal from the Russian perspective is still psychological. Just by making people feel they might be a target, they are having their effect.”
Several defense executives told the newspaper they have tightened their personal security over the past six months on the recommendation of their national security services. In Germany, the BfV has advised companies to assign private details to senior staff.
