On August 13, 2026, Donald Tusk announced that authorities in Warsaw had foiled a plot to kill a dual US-Ukrainian citizen, describing it as the first attempt attributed to Moscow to target an American citizen on the soil of another Nato country. It is tempting to read the episode as something entirely new, the latest escalation in a conflict that seems to know no bounds. That reading is incomplete.
What happened in Warsaw is the latest link in a chain stretching across a century of Soviet and Russian intelligence history, with a remarkably consistent operational logic: the physical elimination of enemies abroad as an instrument of state policy, provided it remains deniable.
A doctrine born in the Soviet era. The paradigm is rooted in the very jargon of the Soviet intelligence services, which called this activity mokrye dela, or “wet affairs.” The first fully documented case bears the signature of Pavel Sudoplatov, who would become the architect of the entire doctrine.
- In May 1938, in Rotterdam, Sudoplatov personally handed Yevhen Konovalets, a leader of Ukrainian nationalism, a box of chocolates containing a timed explosive device: Konovalets was blown apart minutes later. Two years later, Sudoplatov organized the elimination of Lev Trotsky from Moscow.
- In August 1940, in Coyoacán, NKVD agent Ramón Mercader, who had infiltrated the circle of the founder of the Red Army, drove a mountaineering ice axe into his skull. Mercader served twenty years in prison without ever admitting whom he worked for and was nevertheless awarded, in absentia, the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
- This is the first constant: an isolated and expendable operative, protected by silence rather than escape — and a centralized command structure capable of striking, within two years and on two continents, the two most troublesome enemies of Stalinism in exile.
From cyanide to outsourced killings. The second constant — a technical apparatus capable of making an assassination look like a natural death — matured in the 1950s with Department 13 of the KGB, the successor to Sudoplatov’s structure. It was here that Bogdan Stašinski was trained. In 1957, he killed Ukrainian intellectual Lev Rebet in Munich, and in 1959 nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, both with a cyanide spray gun capable of simulating cardiac arrest.
- When Stašinski defected in 1961 and surrendered to the West Germans, the chain of command he exposed, reaching all the way to KGB chairman Shelepin, forced Khrushchev to formally declare individual targeted killings suspended — a suspension more diplomatic than real, but one that marked a doctrinal shift. From then on, whenever possible, Moscow would prefer to outsource executions to allied intelligence services or intermediaries that could not be directly traced back to the Kremlin.
- At the outermost edge of the doctrine lies a case that broke with the logic of deniability rather than perfecting it: in December 1979, during Operation Storm-333, KGB special forces stormed the presidential palace in Kabul and killed Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, replacing him within hours with a leader favored by Moscow — not a covert assassination, but an overt political decapitation designed to facilitate regime change.
It is this model of outsourcing to allied intelligence services that explains the best-known case of the late Cold War: the assassination of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian BBC dissident killed in London on September 11, 1978, with a ricin pellet injected into his leg through the tip of an umbrella on Waterloo Bridge.
- The operation was carried out by Bulgarian intelligence with technical assistance from the KGB: Soviet technology, Bulgarian execution, complete deniability for Moscow. The main suspect, identified only in 2005 thanks to declassified archives in Sofia, was an Italian citizen: Francesco Gullino, born in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, in 1945, recruited by the Bulgarians in 1971 and active for years under the cover of an antiques dealer, using a Danish passport and the codename “Piccadilly.”
- Questioned in Copenhagen in 1993, he admitted working as an agent but denied any involvement in the assassination. He was never charged, as the events had taken place outside Danish jurisdiction and the statute of limitations for espionage had expired.
- He died alone in Austria in 2021, without ever confessing — perhaps the most complete monument to the system’s ability to protect even the material perpetrator until his natural death, not merely those who ordered the killing.
The post-Soviet return. With the end of the USSR, this practice was expected to decline. The opposite happened. The first fully realized post-Soviet case was that of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the former Chechen president living in exile, killed in Doha in February 2004 by a car bomb detonated by two GRU operatives.
- It remains the only case in the entire sequence in which the perpetrators were arrested, tried and convicted — by a Qatari court — before being repatriated under diplomatic pressure from Moscow. The Litvinenko case in London in 2006, by contrast, broke with the tradition of technical deniability. Former FSB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210, an extremely rare isotope that left a radioactive trail everywhere the perpetrators had been.
- The 2016 British public inquiry attributed the operation to Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun and concluded that it was “probably” approved by Putin himself: a weapon so impossible to deny that it raised the possibility that the political message mattered more than concealment.
- The same pattern, with greater technical sophistication, was repeated in Salisbury in 2018 against former GRU agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by two operatives from Unit 29155, in an operation that would also kill British citizen Dawn Sturgess through accidental exposure.
A third form of deniability. Between Skripal and the Polish sequence lies the case of Maksim Kuzminov, the Russian pilot who defected in August 2023, handing his Mi-8 helicopter over to Ukrainian forces.
- After taking refuge in Spain under a false name, he was found dead on February 13, 2024, in a garage in Villajoyosa, killed by multiple gunshots. Spanish intelligence pointed to the possibility of hitmen sent by Moscow — a hypothesis that EU High Representative Borrell described as potentially “very worrying” — but without ever reaching judicial certainty. Some of the Spanish press initially also gave weight to the possibility of a private settling of scores.
- Compared with polonium or Novichok, the use of ordinary firearms in a setting that could be mistaken for conventional crime suggests a third variant of deniability: neither the absence of traces seen in the Markov case, nor the overt political signaling of the British cases, but ambiguity deliberately engineered.
It is within this combination of approaches — complete deniability, diplomatic recovery, overt political signaling, engineered ambiguity — that the Polish sequence of the past two years belongs: a further mutation of the model, no longer confined to dissidents and defectors.
- In 2024, US intelligence discovered and informed Berlin of a Russian plot, the most advanced in a broader series targeting executives in Europe’s defense industry, to kill Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, Germany’s leading manufacturer of ammunition and armored vehicles for Ukraine.
- The episode was reported by anonymous sources cited by CNN and has never been confirmed by judicial documents, although Berlin did not deny it: the weakest level of attribution in the entire recent sequence, yet one consistent with the broader picture. The target in this case was no longer a political opponent but a business executive, targeted because of his role as an industrial node in the Western military supply chain.
From “illegals” to digital proxies. The November 2025 railway sabotage on the Warsaw-Lublin line, the killing of dissident Robert Kuzovkov (Semyon Skrepetsky)
- in June 2026, and the foiled attempt against the US-Ukrainian citizen in August share one feature that sets them apart from Mercader, Stašinski, Markov and Litvinenko: the perpetrators are no longer “illegals” trained over years, but individuals recruited for single missions through encrypted messaging services, paid in cryptocurrency and often unaware of the broader plan.
- It is the model Eurojust documented in its investigation into the incendiary parcels sent in 2024 from DHL hubs in Leipzig and Birmingham, tracing the operation back to the GRU after identifying twenty-two suspects described as “people in socio-economically vulnerable conditions” — the same profile as the 29-year-old arrested in Warsaw on August 7.
This outsourcing does not stem from a doctrinal rethink, but from a structural constraint: the number of operations Moscow needs to conduct simultaneously across Europe — against dissidents, defense-industry figures and logistical infrastructure, and now also against American citizens — is too high for the traditional network of “illegals,” expensive and slow to train, to sustain the pace.
- Proxy recruitment provides volume, but at a price: improvised proxies make mistakes, leave digital traces and are easier to prosecute, as demonstrated by the speed with which the ABW neutralized the August plot.
- Political deniability remains intact — no document ever connects the Kremlin directly to the operative — but operational deniability, which for decades protected even the perpetrators until their natural deaths, as happened with Gullino, has visibly eroded.
From Rotterdam to Warsaw. What remains entirely unchanged is the political function of these operations, identical from Rotterdam to Warsaw: to strike an inconvenient target while remaining below the threshold that would compel Nato to respond collectively, while communicating to every dissident or defector that no distance can provide genuine protection.
- The instrument changes — a box of chocolates, an ice axe, cyanide, an umbrella, a car bomb, polonium, Novichok, an ordinary handgun, today a hitman paid in bitcoin — but not the conviction, spanning a century of Soviet and Russian history, that eliminating an enemy abroad is a legitimate prerogative of the state, provided no one can ever fully prove it.
Seen in this light, it is hardly surprising that the suspected material perpetrator of the Markov assassination was an Italian citizen who was never seriously investigated by Italy: a reminder of how permeable Western counterintelligence — including Italy’s — has long been, and on a far larger scale remains today, when it comes to detecting in time the recruitment of its own citizens by hostile intelligence services operating under commercial cover.
The bottom line: It is the same question, updated to the scale of mass digital recruitment, that now requires the judicial authorities and intelligence services of Poland, Germany, Lithuania and Italy to pursue ever closer multilateral cooperation, coordinated by Eurojust, to detect in real time a proxy network that no single country can any longer monitor alone.
