• Fires at DHL warehouses this year may have been part of Russian sabotage operations, officials said.
• The Kremlin is suspected of stepping up hybrid attacks on Europe in recent months.
• The air cargo industry is poised for further action.

Suspected Russian sabotage activities targeting the air cargo industry have been on the rise this year, and the industry is bracing for further action.

Brandon Fried, executive director of the Airforwarders Association, which represents U.S. airlines, told Business Insider that the industry has been on high alert since 9/11.

“So regardless of who is doing this, whether it’s another country or whether it’s a terrorist organization, our industry has been vigilant for some time,” he said, referring to two fires at DHL warehouses earlier this year that were related to Russia.

“They want to cause fear and panic, but we as a community will not let them. One of our overriding messages is that we are vigilant,” Fried said.

Western officials said that fires, which occurred at two DHL locations in the UK and Germany in July, may have been part of Russian sabotage operations that eventually targeted North America, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.

A package caught fire before being loaded onto a plane at a DHL cargo center in Leipzig, eastern Germany, while a similar incident occurred at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham, UK.

Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said in October that it was a “lucky coincidence” that the package from Leipzig caught fire on the ground and not in flight.

Haldenwang did not explicitly blame Moscow, but German news agency DPA reported that security services were working on the assumption that the attack was linked to Russia, according to Financial Times.

A police spokesman told BI that counter-terrorism officers are leading an investigation into the incident in Birmingham and are working to identify any links to similar incidents across the continent.

The Wall Street Journal report said the fires were caused by electric massagers implanted with a flammable magnesium-based substance.

The devices that ignited in Britain were traced to Lithuania, where officials say they appear to have been part of a wider Russian plot to transport such devices on planes to North America, the Journal reported.

Frank Umbach, director of research at the European Cluster for Climate, Energy and Resource Security at the University of Bonn, said Russian hybrid warfare has escalated from spying on critical infrastructure to active sabotage across Europe.

“Hybrid warfare has intensified here in Europe, especially against Germany,” Umbach said, adding that there was concern that German intelligence services had been “heavily penetrated” by Russian agents.

Moscow has already been linked to a number of incidents of sabotage in Europe this year, including arson attempts and a plan reported to to kill the CEO of the German arms company Rheinmetall, which made ammunition and military equipment for Ukraine.

Russia is suspected of using social media platforms like Telegram to recruit agents to carry out such activities.

Speaking months after the DHL fires, the head of the UK’s MI6 intelligence service, Richard Moore, said he believed Russian intelligence had “gone a bit wild”.

And experts believe such incidents are unlikely to stop anytime soon.

Shashank Joshi, a former senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute who is now the defense editor at The Economist, told BI that he believed the alleged Russian sabotage operations were part of a “quite broad campaign” that could see The Kremlin. target any member of the EU or NATO.

“I don’t think anyone is particularly immune as such,” Joshi said.

A spokesman for Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service, known as BAMAD, said the German military and NATO forces in Germany “continue to be a priority target for Russian espionage activities.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Russia’s involvement in sabotage operations in Europe.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence services and the BND declined to comment further.

Western officials say Moscow has also launched cyber attacks and sought to spreading disinformation as part of his alleged sabotage operations.

Russian state media sites such as RT have already faced sanctions US and the eu because of allegations of misinformation.

Keir Giles, senior research consultant at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, said Russian disinformation campaigns, espionage operations and sabotage attempts were “intimately linked”.

“Information goals can be met by kinetic actions and vice versa,” Giles said. “The information component of warfare is seen as integral and interdependent with all other activities that Russia undertakes.”

“It’s something that played out very clearly in Russia’s war against Ukraine after the full-scale invasion,” he added.