Russia accused of plot to place incendiary devices on planes

 National Review:

In remarks to the New York Times, Western political officials confirmed the rumors swirling around the national-security community over the last several days indicating that Russia is behind an attempted terrorist attack on commercial airliners in Europe.

“Russia has been plotting to place incendiary devices on cargo planes in Europe and even performed a test run this summer, setting off fires at shipping hubs in Britain and Germany,” the Times reported on Tuesday.

The incendiary devices were planted at DHL shipping hubs in Leipzig, Germany, and Birmingham, England, the Western officials said. The fires caused minimal damage and no injuries, they said, but the blazes raised the frightening specter of bombs potentially being loaded on aircraft.

That experiment may have been a prelude to something far more destabilizing: an operation aimed at “destroying planes on American runways, setting off bombs at U.S. warehouses or even blowing up aircraft midair.”

That plot, had it been carried out, would have instantly established a state of war between the Russian Federation and the NATO alliance, the formalities notwithstanding.

The dire implications of this development are hard to overstate. Despite its recent, albeit limited, battlefield successes in Ukraine, Russia’s halting and unsteady response to the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast and the introduction of North Korean forces into the conflict are suggestive of a more unstable dynamic inside the Kremlin. “I think the Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral,” Richard Moore, the former head of the U.K.’s foreign-intelligence service, speculated ominously. The West takes for granted its stable deterrent relationship with Russia, a belligerent but rational actor. This plot calls a lot of the assumptions that underwrite that status quo into question.
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I suspect that Putin decided to take advantage of what he saw as a weak Biden presidency as well as weakness in European leadership.  This led to the Ukraine operation which did not go as smoothly as he must have hoped for.  Ukraine proved itself much more resilient than Russia expected.  The Russians thought they could take Ukraine in a matter of weeks.  The Russians now appear bogged down in Ukraine.  I think they are finding that their own military is much weaker they expected and that Ukraine with support from NATO is much stronger than expected.