Russia in Continuous Attack on Norway

Russia reportedly has been using a northern Norway town to experiment with hybrid warfare and influence operations.

Since annexing Crimea in 2014, Moscow's military and intelligence services have been using Kirkenes, located six miles near the Russian border, as "a laboratory," a regional police chief told The New Yorker.

Russian hackers have employed phishing scams, ransomware, and other forms of cyber warfare, and alleged tourists have been caught photographing sensitive defense and communications infrastructure.

Norway's domestic-intelligence service (PST) has warned of the threat of sabotage to the country's train lines, and to gas facilities that supply energy to much of Europe.

A few months ago, someone cut a vital communications cable running to a Norwegian Air Force base.

"We've seen what we believe to be continuous mapping of our critical infrastructure," regional counterintelligence chief Johan Roaldsnes, told The New Yorker. "I see it as continuous war preparation."

One journalist in Kirkenes told the outlet that Russia is using the Barents Sea for research and development of new delivery systems for nuclear weapons, "including a subsea nuclear torpedo that could flood a coastal city with a radioactive tsunami, and a nuclear-powered cruise missile with global reach."

"The Kola Peninsula is their strategic security against the West," Roaldsnes told The New Yorker. "The whole Russian plan is that, if things really heat up with NATO, they need to create a buffer," to preserve the capability to carry out nuclear strikes.

"That means the ability to control their closest neighboring territory ... and control access to the waters, to prevent anyone from getting close."

European nations acknowledge that their people and infrastructure are under ceaseless attack from Russia. However, each incident falls below the threshold that would require a military response or trigger NATO's Article 5, which states that if one member is attacked, all other members will consider it an attack on all of them.

Every country that borders Russia is preparing for a wider war in the event of a Russian victory in Ukraine, The New Yorker reported.

CNN last week reported that Russia could wreak havoc with the United States' electronic infrastructure vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables carrying more than 95% of international data.

Two U.S. officials recently told the news outlet that Russia had increased military activity around the cables in the Baltic Sea near Denmark.

Russia clearly sees itself at war with the West.

"That's for sure — we are saying that openly," the Russian U.N. representative recently said, The New Yorker reported.

Russians and proxies have used hybrid warfare, designed to subdue the enemy without fighting. They aim to subvert, sabotage, destabilize, and instill fear.

"They do it because they can do it," an air-traffic controller said of an electronic-warfare attack that imperils civilian aviation. "Then they deny everything, and they threaten you, saying that, if you don't stop accusing them of what you know they're doing, bad things will happen to you."

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