The petty criminals doing Putin’s dirty work – and causing chaos across Europe

Poland felt the impact of this kind of criminal damage on Monday, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it out as sabotage. Authorities revealed an explosion on a railway line south of Warsaw that was used for deliveries to Ukraine. Nobody was killed, but the destruction could have been lethal. The Polish Security Services Minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, said there was a “very high” chance the damage was done on the orders of a foreign spy service: “We are dealing with the services of a foreign state, and not a gang of scrap metal thieves.” Petty criminals in Germany, Poland and Britain are also being jailed for helping Russian spy agencies and their ultimate controller, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer in East Germany. The crimes range from vandalism to arson and attempted assassination. The pattern will be familiar to Australians after security agencies named Iran as the instigator of antisemitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne over the past year, again, using low-level criminals. In Europe, however, the prosecutions are overwhelmingly about Russian influence.