**Europe Under Siege: Moscow Targets Critical Infrastructure**

What appeared to be a bizarre local accident in western Norway should have sent shockwaves throughout Europe. In April 2025, someone remotely seized control of a hydroelectric dam in Bremanger, opening its floodgates and unleashing millions of cubic meters of water downstream for hours. It wasn't until months later that Norway's intelligence service confirmed the culprits were linked to Moscow. This act was not meant to destroy the dam – it was a calling card.

Many Europeans still believe the war stops at Ukraine's border, but they're wrong. While Russian artillery pounds Kherson and Kharkiv, a parallel campaign is being waged inside Europe's economic engine room. The weapons are not tanks, but malware, forged documents, anonymous leaks, shadow tankers, and well-timed "grassroots" protests. The targets are the very things Europe needs to free itself from Russian energy and Chinese raw materials: new liquid natural gas terminals, wind-farm control systems, undersea data cables, rare earth element mines, and companies bold enough or foolish enough to build them.

The numbers can no longer be ignored. In 2024 alone, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity logged over 11,000 serious cyber incidents across the EU, with attacks on industrial control systems jumping to nearly 20 percent of the total. The pattern is unmistakable.

**The Campaign Unfolds**

When Germany's Enercon lost remote access to 5,800 wind turbines after the 2022 Viasat hack, it was an early proof of concept. Since then, Vestas, Nordex, French grid operators, and Italian substations have all been hit. In the Netherlands, someone briefly took over port-logistics systems in Rotterdam and Eemshaven – just as new liquid natural gas import facilities came online.

At sea, sabotage has moved from plausible deniability to routine. The ruptured Baltic Connector gas pipeline and the severed Estonian data cable in 2024 both carried the same forensic fingerprints European services have learned to recognize. Meanwhile, Russian "research" ships linger suspiciously close to the arteries that carry 70 percent of Europe's internet traffic.

**Moscow's Arsenal**

Russian shadow tankers keep Western sanctions at bay while creating convenient cover for "accidental" anchor-dragging exercises near critical infrastructure. On dry land, the Kremlin has turned expropriation into an art form. The Russian subsidiaries of Danone and Carlsberg were simply confiscated in 2023 and handed to regime-friendly oligarchs.

Any Western company trying to leave Russia faces a forced fire-sale at a 50 percent discount, plus a 15 percent "exit tax" that has quietly transferred more than $60 billion into Moscow's war chest since 2022. As a result of these onerous conditions, over 11,000 companies – most from Germany and the U.S. – have remained in Russia, contributing an estimated $5 billion in taxes to the Kremlin.

**The Information War**

The information war runs parallel to the economic campaign, and it's getting surgical. The DoppelGänger network of fake news sites is the blunt instrument; the sharper tool is the anonymous drip of real but carefully edited corporate documents to journalists and activists.

One instructive case is Norge Mining, a British-Norwegian venture sitting on what may be Europe's largest undeveloped deposit of phosphate, vanadium, and titanium – minerals the continent desperately needs for fertilizers, batteries, and fighter jets. Ever since the project moved toward final permits, it has been buried under waves of leaked emails, doctored environmental studies, sudden "whistleblowers," cyberattacks, and remarkably well-funded local opposition.

**The Way Forward**

Western security services that track Russian economic-intelligence operations say they've seen this playbook before. It works. Even inside Ukraine, corruption is being weaponized. Recent multibillion-dollar scandals in the energy sector did not just enrich a few well-connected oligarchs; they delayed repairs to the grid, slowed the integration of Western aid, and increased the risk of winter blackouts.

Europe needs to get serious about defending itself. Governments must finally accept that a phosphate mine in Norway or a liquid natural gas terminal in Germany is as strategic as an airbase, and protect them accordingly with intelligence coverage, mandatory cyber standards, and real-time monitoring of subsea infrastructure.

Companies have to grow up fast: early-warning systems for disinformation, proper supply-chain security, and crisis playbooks that don't begin with "issue apologetic press release." The West needs to get serious about offensive countermeasures – targeted sanctions that actually hurt the specific Russian intelligence units, cut-out companies, and oligarchs who finance and execute these operations.

Russia long ago updated its doctrine for 21st-century warfare. Europe is still fighting with 20th-century tools and reflexes as it pretends this is just "hybrid mischief" rather than an economic war it's now losing piece by piece.