Russia is ramping up attempts to kill opponents in Europe, three Western intelligence officials told The Associated Press, describing a campaign that has become more brazen since President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The officials said the scope has expanded beyond the “usual suspects” to include Russian activists and foreign supporters of Ukraine, carried out in ways they said increasingly rely on non-officer proxies. They spoke to AP on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
AP reported that officials connected the targeted killings to a broader effort to undermine European countries that support Ukraine, including sabotage and other disruption linked by Western officials to Russia. One senior European intelligence official said, “This campaign is not by accident or chance,” adding, “There is political authorization.” AP also reported that many of those accused in recent cases were people recruited as low-cost intermediaries for Russian intelligence operatives, an approach described in French court documents and by Lithuanian prosecutors.
The AP report highlighted several European investigations and arrests. In Lithuania, officials disrupted plots that included targets tied to Ukraine-related activism and to Russian opposition figures, AP said. Officials in Germany also broke up two plots described by AP—one targeting the head of a German weapons company supplying Ukraine and another targeting a Ukrainian military official. Polish authorities, AP reported, arrested a man in 2024 whom prosecutors said they believed was part of a plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
AP also described an investigation involving Spain, where a Russian helicopter pilot who defected was killed, with Russian operatives described by officials as prime suspects. In the cases the AP report described, officials said the fact that many plots have been foiled in public does not necessarily mean attacks will stop; the officials said Russia can still conduct such operations when it chooses, including by reaching targets through intermediaries.
One of the cases centered on Russian activist Vladimir Osechkin, who lives in France and has said he has been protected since 2022. AP reported that French officials believe Russia is trying to kill him, and court documents seen by AP described a team of Russian men staking out Osechkin’s home and the surrounding area for several hours in April 2025, taking videos and photos they said were part of alleged groundwork for an assassination. AP reported that Osechkin said that several years earlier, he saw a red dot on his wall that he believed was a laser sight for a gun.
Osechkin’s account to AP also linked the escalation of threats to his work, including investigating alleged Russian abuses in Ukraine and helping Russian military defectors flee. AP reported that he moved to France in 2015 and that police protection began seven years later after French officials received information that his life was in danger. “If it weren’t for them, I probably would have been killed,” Osechkin said.
In Lithuania, the AP report described how targets said authorities tried to offer safety by asking them to stop public work or effectively disappear. Ruslan Gabbasov, who advocates for independence for the Russian region of Bashkortostan, told AP that he discovered an Apple AirTag tracker hidden on his car in February 2025, and he said officers then followed the people he believed were tracking him. Later, Gabbasov told AP, officials called and warned him not to return home after they detained a person “waiting for you with a gun,” according to his account. Gabbasov said Lithuanian authorities offered him the chance to change his name, move, and stop his work, which he declined, saying it would play into Moscow’s hands.
AP said Lithuanian prosecutors charged 13 people from at least seven countries in two plots involving Bartkevičius and Gabbasov, and prosecutors said the individuals were directly ordered by Russian military intelligence. The report also said authorities identified connections to Russian organized crime in some of the people involved and said those cases could be linked to other plots, including arson and espionage, elsewhere in Europe.
For Bartkevičius, AP reported, Lithuanian prosecutors brought charges after he said authorities discovered a plot to kill him with a bomb planted in his mailbox in March 2025. AP reported that he also declined authorities’ offer to “disappear,” telling AP that stepping away from public activism would be “social death,” given his involvement in raising money for Ukraine and his profile shaped by past actions.
The AP report also set the cases in a wider counterintelligence context, describing how Western officials said shifts in access and operations after high-profile assassinations have affected tactics. Cmdr. Dominic Murphy, AP reported, said that after Britain accused Moscow of the Salisbury nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal in 2018—an attack the U.K. government attributed to Russian military intelligence—Western countries expelled hundreds of Russian diplomats and spies, making it harder for officers to operate openly across Europe. Murphy, AP said, linked the subsequent difficulties to a greater reliance on proxies.
AP reported that Western intelligence officials said the public foiling of many plots since 2022 could mean Russia finds it harder to carry them out with proxies, while also warning that attempted killings can serve other purposes, including scaring opponents into silence and wasting law enforcement resources. The officials said one reason targets may never feel secure is that even if an operation fails once, they may face another attempt.
Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told AP he didn’t see “any need” to comment, the report said, adding that Russian officials have previously denied that Moscow is behind attempts to kill opponents abroad. AP also reported that officials told it Russia’s security services can kill someone in Europe if they really want to, pointing in part to the case of Maxim Kuzminov, the defector pilot who was threatened with death on Russian state television before his killing in Spain.