One of the most serious plans to kill the head of a European arms company is one of the revelations made by Western intelligence agencies in Europe. As a result, the government of the West has discovered Russian plots to carry out assassinations, fire, and other sabotage against businesses and individuals connected to Ukraine’s defense.
The official, who is aware of the situation but not authorized to reply, said that occasionally the plots involved recruiting regular criminals from abroad to carry out the attacks. He referred to the circumstance as” the conspiracy.” One main narrative just uncovered had targeted Armin Papperger, CEO of defence firm Rheinmetall, the national said.
The national declined to provide any information regarding any additional plots that were first reported by CNN. According to the CNN report, the US provided information to Germany, whose security forces were able to foil the plot and defend Papperger.
Rheinmetall is a big supplier of military equipment and artillery shells to Ukraine as it battles Russian forces. The business next quarter opened a maintenance and repair service for armored vehicles in eastern Ukraine, and it intends to begin production there as well.
White House National Security Council spokesman Adrienne Watson said,” Russia’s intensifying battle of usurpation is something we are taking very seriously and have been carefully focused on over the past few months, and we have been taking it very seriously.
” We are constantly working up to expose and destroy these activities, and the United States has been talking about this matter with our Nato allies,” Watson continued. We’ve also made it abundantly clear that Russia’s actions wo n’t stop allies from supporting Ukraine.
On the alleged plot against Papperger, neither Rheinmetall nor the German authorities did comment on Friday. The Interior Ministry ca n’t comment on “individual threat situations”, spokesperson Maximilian Kall said, but he added that more broadly,” we take the significantly increased threat from Russian aggression very seriously”.
” We know that ( Russian President Vladimir ) Putin’s regime wants above all to undermine our support for Ukraine in its defense against the Russian war of aggression, but the German government wo n’t be intimidated”, Kall said.
He noted that European security measures have increased significantly since 2022 and that” the challenges range from spy and destroy, through attacks, to express terrorism”.
This week, Western leaders at the Nato conference in Washington discussed how to stop the rise in “hybrid” assaults that they attribute to Russia and its allies.
That includes allegations that Russia-allied Belarus was sending large numbers of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa to Poland, Latvia, and additional nations ‘ edges, as well as what officials have described as cautious new fires at industrial and commercial websites in Lithuania, Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other places.
Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he could never comment on the CNN record when asked at a press conference on Thursday at the Nato conference. He did notice a common strategy by Russian protection services to perform “hostile actions” against Nato allies, including damage, cyberattacks and fire.
” These are not independent situations. These are part of a design, part of an ongoing Russian plan. And the purpose of this plan is, of course, to terrify Nato friends from supporting Ukraine”, Stoltenberg said.
In April, European authorities arrested two German-Russian people on suspicion of spy, one of them accused of agreeing to carry out strikes on potential priorities, including US military features, in hopes of sabotaging support for Ukraine.
Since Russia began its extensive invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, Germany has come in second place after the United States in terms of munitions supply to Ukraine.
The statement of a Papperger murder plot was refuted by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. ” All of this is suddenly presented in the false fashion, so such information may be taken seriously”, he told reporters Friday.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to his Soviet rival, Andrei Belousov, on Friday, their next visit in less than a fortnight, Pentagon assistant press secretary Sabrina Singh announced at a lecture Friday. The visit was initiated by the Soviet defence minister, Singh said.
She did not have any additional information to share, such as whether the two leaders discussed the claims that Russia had attempted to assassinate top leaders of American defence companies producing weapons systems for Ukraine. She said “maintaining lines of communication is very important right now.
