Russia is mounting an increasingly brazen campaign of targeted killings against its opponents on European soil, according to three Western intelligence officials who spoke to The Associated Press, with plots disrupted in at least five countries and a pattern that intelligence agencies and prosecutors say points to political authorization from the Kremlin.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, described a campaign that has escalated since President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Where Russia’s security services once focused on military defectors and former spies, they now target a broader range of perceived enemies: Russian activists living in exile, foreign supporters of Ukraine, and regional independence advocates whose work threatens Moscow’s interests.
“This campaign is not by accident or chance,” one of the officials, a senior European intelligence official, told the AP. “There is political authorization.”
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he did not see “any need” to comment, and Russian officials have previously denied that Moscow is behind attempts to kill opponents abroad.
The most detailed account comes from France, where court documents seen by the AP — which are not public — describe a plot against Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian activist who has lived in the country since 2015. Osechkin founded a rights group for prisoners years ago and runs a project that exposes abuses in Russia’s prison system, but the threats against him, he said, escalated after he began investigating alleged Russian abuses in Ukraine and helping Russian military defectors flee.
In April 2025, four men from Russia’s Dagestan region traveled to the beach resort of Biarritz, where Osechkin lives, and surveilled his home for several hours, taking videos and photos “with a view to assassinating him and subsequently intimidating all political opponents of the Russian authorities living in France,” the court documents said. One of the men had multiple criminal convictions; another said he had been arrested by Russia’s domestic security service and fled the country to avoid being sent to Ukraine.
Osechkin has been under French police protection since 2022, when officials received information that his life was in danger. When he wants to take his children to school or go to the supermarket, he calls the police. “If it weren’t for them, I probably would have been killed,” he said. Several years earlier, a red dot — which he thought was a laser sight for a gun — appeared on his wall.
In Lithuania, authorities disrupted two separate plots in early 2025. Ruslan Gabbasov, an advocate for independence for the Russian region of Bashkortostan, discovered an Apple AirTag tracker hidden on his car in February. Police told him to leave the device and followed the people following him. Weeks later, while attending Lithuania’s independence day celebrations with his wife and 5-year-old son, officers called with an urgent warning.
“Yesterday, a killer was detained near your house; he was waiting for you with a gun,” Gabbasov said officers told him. “He was ready to wait for you all night.”
Lithuanian authorities offered Gabbasov the chance to completely disappear — change his name, relocate, and abandon his political work. He refused. His home region, a mainly Muslim area near Kazakhstan, is important to the Kremlin because of its gold reserves and because large numbers of its men have been sent to fight in Ukraine, he said, and many in the region view him as a leader in the independence campaign.
“I can’t betray them all by simply disappearing, especially out of fear,” Gabbasov said. “What difference does it make to them? They could kill me … or I could hide from everyone and stop engaging in political activity. That’s exactly what they want.”
The second Lithuanian plot targeted Valdas Bartkevičius, an activist who raises money for Ukraine and gained notoriety for anti-Russian acts including urinating on a Russian war memorial. Authorities discovered a plan to kill him with a bomb planted in his mailbox in March 2025. Bartkevičius also rejected an offer to go into hiding, calling it “social death.”
Lithuanian prosecutors have charged 13 people from at least seven countries with involvement in the two plots — part of a group of at least 20 people authorities have detained, charged, or identified as involved in assassination plots across Europe over the past year. The people involved in the Lithuanian cases were directly ordered by Russian military intelligence, prosecutors said, and some had connections to Russian organized crime and could be linked to other arson and espionage plots elsewhere in Europe.
The plots span the continent. Germany has broken up two: one targeting the head of a German weapons company supplying Ukraine, the other against a Ukrainian military official. Polish authorities arrested a man in 2024 in what they said was a plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And a Russian helicopter pilot who defected, Maxim Kuzminov, was killed in Spain in 2024, with Russian operatives named as the prime suspects.
The intelligence officials, a former senior British counterterrorism official, and prosecutors in Lithuania described the assassination campaign as connected to Russia’s broader efforts to undermine European countries that support Ukraine — efforts the AP has mapped to include 191 acts of sabotage, arson, and other disruption across Europe since the war began. Many accused in that broader campaign were people recruited as cheap proxies for Russian intelligence operatives.
Moscow’s switch to relying on such proxies can be traced to a previous assassination attempt, according to Cmdr. Dominic Murphy, who spoke to the AP before retiring as head of the counterterrorism squad at Britain’s Metropolitan Police. In 2018, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury, England — an attack the U.K. government said Moscow carried out with military intelligence officers. In response, Britain and other Western nations expelled hundreds of Russian diplomats and intelligence officers, making it harder for Russian officers to operate in Europe. That constraint, Murphy said as a lead investigator in the Skripal case, is one reason Moscow turned to the proxy model.
The fact that most of the plots made public by Western officials since 2022 have been foiled could indicate