It seems like every week a new event transpires on the geopolitical stage that causes total freakouts on X that ultimately results in “World War III” becoming a trending hashtag. It’s understandable given how high tensions are right now between Israel, Palestine, and Iran, not to mention the conflict still raging between Ukraine and Russia. And there’s still Kim Jong Un in North Korea who tries his hand at a little sabre rattling now and then.
But, and hear me out, what if we’re all sitting on the edge of our seats, beads of sweat making streams down our faces, chomping down our fingernails like beavers on a log of wood, waiting for the event that launches this global conflict, and it already happened?
via Reason:
Britain’s signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There’s evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.
“We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations,” Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler said while addressing an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. “Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West.”
Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind “physical attacks” raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.
“A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state,” CBS News said in a report released last month.
“In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent,” The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a “shadow war” between East and West. “Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted.”
These warnings from the chief of the GCHQ, along with what’s happening on the ground are both alarming enough on their own. However, when you add those to the warnings that were issued by FBI Director Christopher Wray back in April concerning China, well, color me worried.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist,” Wray stated while speaking at the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.
The head of the FBI then explained that when he spoke of “infrastructure” he was talking about “”everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology.”
Was that clarification supposed to make me feel better? If so, Wray failed miserably. I actually feel even more unsettled. Say, maybe all those folk who stock up on canned goods and have an emergency shelter were right all along.
Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there’s evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.
In June 2022, The New York Timesreported that Ukraine’s defensive efforts relied heavily on “a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training.” In addition to Americans, the story noted, “commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine.”
So are you still curious about who was responsible for the Nord Stream 1 and 2 going Kablooey? Me too. And a lot of other people also. At first, all fingers pointed at Russia, but that really didn’t make sense. Why would Russia destroy pipelines that helped them make a lot of money and kept Western nations dependent on natural gas from their own country? Both Denmark and Sweden have conducted investigations that were “inconclusive.”
A journalist by the name of Seymour Hersh said it’s all America’s fault, while several other media outlets say a rogue Ukrainian military officer is responsible for the incident.
Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia’s continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.
“Russia is definitely at war with the West,” Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, said during a conversation with NBC News earlier in the week.
Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism “special military operation,” is now more serious. “It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict,” he remarked.
The one piece of good news that comes out of a shadow war is that it is far less destructive than open military conflict, especially when you consider the nations involved in such a war would be in possession of nuclear weapons. You don’t have to be a genius to see that hacking email accounts belonging to government officials is better than seeing bombs drop and cities evaporate. However, that doesn’t mean this is a war without consequences.
People are still trying to do one another harm, but indirectly, by taking out infrastructure that folks rely on.