(Adnkronos) – A 17-year-old Ukrainian, an unemployed refugee, responded to the ad promising a BMW and about $11,000 in cash to set fire to an Ikea store in Lithuania, an act of sabotage that cost him jail time and a series of charges for terrorism offences. The New York Times writes about it today, citing investigations into the case. Daniil Bardadim, a teenager fleeing the war in Ukraine, responded to the offer early last year after traveling to Warsaw, in neighboring Poland. He was given a BMW, but then didn’t receive the money. And he found himself transformed into an unwitting pawn of Russia, as part of a multi-pronged sabotage campaign across Europe, according to Lithuanian investigators quoted by the newspaper.
Shopping malls, warehouses, undersea cables and railways in Europe have all been hit in the past two years in what the Center for Strategic and International Studies describes as a disruption by the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU. The number of covert Russian attacks nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024. This has worried European governments who fear that President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is part of a broader offensive underway elsewhere and that it could easily escalate into further overt aggression.
“We have already entered a war zone in Europe,” said Darius Jauniskis, outgoing director of Lithuania’s State Security Department. “Their goal,” he said, “is to create disruption, create distrust and panic” and undermine public support for Ukraine. “Welcome to World War III,” he added. (continued)
The attack Bardadim is accused of took place last May, when an incendiary device planted in an IKEA store in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, caught fire in the middle of the night. Police officers then stopped a bus the young man was traveling on, from Lithuania to neighboring Latvia, and arrested him. Among his possessions they found incendiary devices which investigators believe would have been used in another arson attack in the Latvian capital, Riga.
Why Ukrainian citizens would be involved in a sabotage campaign on behalf of their country’s enemy has raised troubling questions for Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, the New York Times writes. These countries have taken in tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine and have lobbied hard for increased Western military aid to help Kiev resist Russia. Bardadim grew up in Kherson, a predominantly Russian-speaking city in southern Ukraine near the Black Sea that, before the war began, was home to many residents who looked favorably on Russia. Bardadim’s mother still lives there. Reached by phone in Kherson, she declined to comment.
Lithuanian investigators believe Bardadim and the others involved in the IKEA attack were motivated primarily by money. Last month, Arturas Urbelis, the chief prosecutor, described them as “young individuals who clearly lack life experience” and who, because of the war in Ukraine, “found themselves in a difficult material situation.” Perhaps – he added – “they did not understand the ultimate goal” of those who, hiding behind pseudonyms on social media, commissioned and guided their work. (continued)
People recruited by the GRU “are obviously not professionals,” they are easily caught, and they are often in financial difficulty and therefore attracted to “offers of quick and easy money,” Jauniskis added. By looking for recruits on social media, Russian intelligence agencies “simply throw out bait to see who bites,” he added. Asked if any evidence had been found that Bardadim had enlisted as a saboteur out of loyalty to Russia, the Lithuanian Prosecutor General’s Office replied that “there is no information to indicate that the accused holds pro-Russian views.”
According to Lithuanian investigators, many of the instructions sent to Bardadim and other recruits were transmitted via Telegram by a user calling himself Warrior2Alpha. Another communication channel was Zengi, a Chinese messaging app. The Ukrainian teenager was recruited by what investigators describe as an underground Russian network directed by the GRU and other Russian agencies to spread chaos. According to Lithuanian prosecutors, he communicated on Zengi with an unidentified handler using the alias ‘Q’, apparently referring to the character from the James Bond films.
