Poland says it stopped a Russian-directed plot to murder a US citizen in Warsaw - the first time, its prime minister says, that Moscow has tried to kill an American inside another Nato country.

Polish security services detained a Russian citizen on August 7 who had been recruited by Russian intelligence and tasked with killing a man holding both American and Ukrainian citizenship, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on August 13. The target was described as inconvenient to the Putin government, Al Jazeera reported.

The latest attacks come in the wake of the assassination attempt in Monaco last month where a Ukrainian bomber tried to kill an oligarch with a bomb as the use of covert operations spread out from the wheat fields of Donbas to the rest of Europe.

The Polish plot did not happen in isolation. On August 13, a fire in the powder compression department at the KNDS Ammo Italy plant at Colleferro, southeast of Rome, was followed by a large explosion. Nobody was killed. The plant makes 155 mm artillery ammunition supplied to Ukraine through European partners, the Kyiv Independent reported.

A week earlier, on August 6, a drone carrying explosives was found near a runway at Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany, beside a Ukrainian Antonov Airlines cargo aircraft. Two days after that, drones were seen over the Bundeswehr base at Mechernich. In the Netherlands, Europe's largest port had a transformer fire, a major power failure and an emergency shutdown at an ExxonMobil refinery within a few hours.

Any one of these has an innocent reading. Industrial plants catch fire; grids fail; drones are flown by idiots. What makes the run hard to dismiss is that the targets sort themselves so neatly: ammunition bound for Ukraine, an aircraft operated by a Ukrainian cargo airline, a military base, energy infrastructure at a port, and a man Moscow wanted dead.

An investigation in July found people being recruited online for sabotage jobs across the Baltics and Poland - low-paid, disposable operatives hired through messaging apps by handlers they never meet - and Russia was accused of routing explosive parcels through Riga in 2025.

The pattern is much older than that. An explosion at an arms depot at Vrbetice in Czechia's Zlin region in October 2014 killed two men, and a second blast at a nearby depot followed that December. The weapons stored there belonged to the Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev and were bound for Ukraine, then fighting Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. Prague blamed GRU Unit 29155, naming Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga - the pair later identified over the Salisbury poisonings - and expelled 18 Russian diplomats in April 2021. Moscow denied involvement and expelled 20 Czech diplomats in return.

Days later Bulgaria's then chief prosecutor, Ivan Geshev, said four explosions at Bulgarian weapons factories between 2011 and 2020 had most likely been carried out by six GRU officers, each of whom was in the country around the date of a blast. Those warehouses also held Gebrev's munitions, destined for Ukraine and Georgia, and Gebrev himself survived a poisoning attempt in 2015. All four shared a signature, Geshev said: a fire first, then the explosives triggered from a distance.

The resemblance to Colleferro is not evidence - a fire ahead of an explosion is also simply what a fire at a munitions plant does. The target logic is the harder thing to wave away. Vrbetice held weapons for Ukraine, and Colleferro makes shells for Ukraine.

Neither case reached a courtroom. Czech police named Unit 29155, the investigation was shelved, and in July 2024 a state prosecutor closed the case against a deep-cover GRU spy decorated by Putin for her part in the operation, finding no suspicion of a crime. The incidents of the past week are unattributed. So, in the end, were these.

The traffic has run the other way too. Through the spring of 2022 fires and explosions swept Russian ammunition depots, oil facilities, arms plants and military enlistment offices - Belgorod, Bryansk, Ussuriysk, and a gunpowder factory at Perm where two people died - and were put down at the time to pro-Ukrainian saboteurs. Russian officials called them accidents. One firebombing of a recruitment centre was caught on CCTV, but most of that run was never formally attributed either.

What has changed is the target list. Recruiting a local to set fire to a warehouse is deniable sabotage. Hiring one to shoot an American in a Nato capital is something else, and Tusk chose his words to say so.