Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russian units are suspected of purchasing sensitive real estate close to military and civilian sites in at least a dozen European nations. Photo / Vyacheslav Prokofyev, Pool, AFP
Russian spies have turned properties across Western Europe into a network of “Trojan horses” designed to unleash a co-ordinated sabotage campaign, intelligence officials have warned.
Exploiting weak legal frameworks, clandestine Russian units are suspected of purchasing sensitive real estate close to military and civilian sites in at least a dozen European nations.
Intent on escalating its “hybrid war” on the West, Russian spy agencies have allegedly acquired summer houses, holiday cabins, warehouses, abandoned schools, city flats and even entire islands with the intention of using them as launchpads for co-ordinated surveillance, sabotage and covert attacks.
Serving and former officers at three European intelligence agencies have told the Telegraph they fear Russia may already have explosives, drones, weapons and undercover operatives at some of the sites, ready to be activated in a crisis.
Acts of sabotage linked to Moscow – ranging from arson attacks in London and Warsaw to parcel bombs, assassination plots and attempted train derailments – have surged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago.
Some in the Western intelligence community fear these incidents may be little more than “test runs”.
Rather than launching a conventional military assault, intelligence officials say the Kremlin may seek to test Nato resolve in the “grey zone”, staging deniable attacks on a grander scale to paralyse transport, communications and energy networks, while complicating any invocation of the alliance’s Article 5 collective defence clause.
“A sabotage campaign is less likely to produce consensus around Article 5 than a conventional Russian military operation,” an intelligence officer said.
“Deniability – plausible or otherwise – makes attribution harder and, without certainty, it becomes much trickier to rally support.”
Blaise Metreweli, the new head of MI6, used her first speech in charge to warn that Britain was now “operating in a space between peace and war”.
“Russia is testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war,” Metreweli said in December.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky warned at the weekend that Russian President Vladimir Putin has already started a third world war against the West.
“Russia wants to impose on the world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves,” he said.
Moscow is suspected of using spy ships and shadow-fleet vessels to position sensors and remotely detonated explosives near undersea cables in British waters and elsewhere.
By acquiring property close to military bases or vital civilian infrastructure, officials believe Russia may be pursuing a similar strategy on land.
“Critical national infrastructure is acutely vulnerable to malicious state activity,” one intelligence official said.
“Allowing Russian nationals to invest largely unimpeded in strategic real estate is a significant threat vector that urgently needs addressing.”
Britain is seen as vulnerable to such an attack.
While suspicious property acquisitions close to the MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall, central London, and the United States embassy at Nine Elms have been investigated, security experts and some politicians fear Russia may have acquired – or will seek to acquire – remote properties overlooking the Trident submarine base at Faslane in west Scotland or subsea cable landing points in Shetland.
There are also fears that Russians could have bought houses around RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.
European states are now being told to follow the example of Finland, which in July imposed a near-blanket ban on Russians and Belarusians buying real estate, triggering a chain reaction in Baltic states that have adopted similar legislation.
Few other European countries have gone as far, however, and there are concerns that Britain remains vulnerable because of ownership loopholes, even after tightening disclosure rules.
Finland’s caution is rooted in experience. It is widely regarded by intelligence officials as the epicentre of a clandestine Russian strategy to acquire strategically located property – a model that Moscow is now believed to be replicating across Europe.
No case has alarmed Finnish authorities more than Airiston Helmi, a company that quietly acquired 17 properties around the Archipelago Sea, many of them close to key maritime routes and telecommunications infrastructure near the port of Turku, home to Finland’s maritime industry and naval command.
The most striking of these was the island of Sakkiluoto. On the morning of September 22, 2018, residents across the channel watched in disbelief as helicopters and speedboats dropped off hundreds of camouflaged commandos on to the island.
What investigators found was extraordinary. The property had nine piers, a helipad, security cameras and motion detectors, camouflage netting and buildings resembling barracks, each fitted with satellite dishes and advanced communications equipment.
Finland chose not to antagonise Moscow directly, charging the company’s Russian owner Pavel Melnikov with fraud. He was handed a suspended sentence last year.
The Russian Government dismissed suspicions of espionage, with Dmitry Medvedev, the former President, claiming that only a “sick mind” could draw such conclusions.
Finnish politicians were less convinced, noting that Airiston Helmi had also purchased surplus landing craft from the country’s Navy.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, officials say Russia has largely abandoned such grandiose projects, instead focusing on replicating Airiston Helmi “in miniature but at scale”, turning hundreds, perhaps thousands, of otherwise unremarkable buildings across Europe into listening posts, safe houses and potential weapons depots.
Some are openly owned by the Russian state, albeit designated for ostensibly benign purposes.
Western governments have begun shutting several down. Poland closed Russia’s consulate in Gdansk last November, while Britain stripped a Russian-owned estate in East Sussex of its diplomatic status the previous year after neighbours reported surveillance drones being deployed from the property.
Latvia has closed Soviet-era resorts along its Baltic coast amid fears they could be used as a staging ground for covert operations.
Harder to track are the far greater numbers of properties owned by Russian individuals and companies.
In Norway, cabins linked to Kremlin-connected figures sit close to sensitive Arctic military sites.
This includes homes in Malselv Fjellandsby, overlooking Bardufoss Air Base in Troms, one of the country’s most important military bases and equipped with mountain hangars to protect the F-35s stationed there.
The Russian Orthodox Church – long regarded by Western intelligence agencies as closely aligned with the Kremlin – has acquired property near naval bases and radar installations in Norway and Sweden, prompting security concerns.
In Norway, overlooking the Haakonsvern naval base in Bergen, lies the Soreide prayer house, which a Russian Orthodox congregation bought in 2017.
Officials warned at the time of Russians being able to disrupt signals and control drones from there as well as hosting Russians who would want to map the area.
In the Swedish city of Vasteras, a church, patrolled by attack dogs and surrounded by fencing and cameras, was built close to a strategically important airport in 2023 and later assessed by Swedish intelligence as a potential platform for espionage.
The priest overseeing the church received a medal from the SVR, Russia’s main civilian foreign intelligence service, officials said.
“For over a decade, Russian entities have systematically purchased properties in Finland, Sweden and Norway in close proximity to military bases, ports and strategic supply lines,” said Charlie Edwards, a senior fellow for strategy and national security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
“What once looked like suspicious commercial activity has evolved into a recognised vector for hybrid warfare, surveillance and potential sabotage.”
Beyond the Nordic region, European intelligence agencies have flagged Russian-linked acquisitions near naval bases and strategic waterways in Sicily, Crete, and mainland Greece, as well as close to sensitive sites in London, Paris, and Geneva.
Taking over city flats to undermine enemy states is a Cold War tactic, noted Charly Salonius-Pasternak, the head of the Nordic West Office, a Helsinki-based geopolitical advisory.
“The Soviet Union famously owned a number of apartments in Helsinki for anything from spying and honey traps to stashing weapons to enable a faster takeover of the city,” he said.
Switzerland is emerging as a particular concern. Intelligence officials say Russian operatives used properties near a federal chemical protection institute that investigated the Salisbury poisonings to intercept Wi-Fi networks and track weapons experts.
There has also been a reported surge in Russian purchases in villages near the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, raising fears of potential sabotage to power lines and data cables.
Security agencies say there is growing evidence that China is pursuing a similar – though more limited – strategy.
“Russia has been doing this for a while, but it’s not only Russia,” said Minna Alander of the Stockholm Centre for Eastern Europe Studies, citing the Chinese purchase of a hotel near sensitive military infrastructure, including an air base in Switzerland set to host F-35 fighter jets. Under pressure from the US, the Swiss military acquired the property in 2024.
“We now have a better awareness that there is a pattern, but I think in Europe we are at a pretty early stage of understanding this strategy and what to do about it,” Alander added.
China’s objectives, officials say, are more focused on long-term surveillance.
By positioning itself near fibre-optic routes, data centres and communications nodes, Beijing aims to harvest encrypted data now on the assumption that some of it may become readable in the future as computing technology advances.
Russia’s ambitions are more immediate and more dangerous.
Intelligence officials warn it is not only preparing to spy, but to strike, potentially launching co-ordinated drone or sabotage attacks from pre-positioned properties in a future crisis.
It would not be too hard, noted Salonius-Pasternak, to send Russian operatives masquerading as a stag party to a property purporting to be a resort – such as Airiston Helmi’s Sakkiluoto lair – that has been stashed with weapons.
“If you spoke like this 15 years ago, people would say you have been watching too many Tom Cruise movies,” Salonius-Pasternak said.
“That has changed. As we saw in Ukraine, there tend to be many operations before the big war starts.”
Despite the scale of the threat, analysts fear European states are not responding fast enough.
While Latvia, Lithuania and Norway have tightened controls and Estonia plans to introduce restrictions this summer, a proposed European Union-wide ban on property sales to Russian buyers collapsed last year amid resistance from states concerned about the economic fallout.
Cyprus, in particular, reportedly raised objections, despite a spate of Moscow-linked real estate acquisitions close to British bases on the island.
The result, experts warn, is a patchwork of laws riddled with blind spots, compounded by a reluctance among intelligence agencies to share sensitive data across borders.
“As long as counter-intelligence remains national, it will fail to address a threat that crosses every national boundary in Europe,” one security official said.
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