“The threat of a catastrophic mistake is evident,” says Alejandro Mayorkas
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President Joe Biden’s advisers have sent a warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin after fearing the Russians will bring the war in Ukraine to the United States, according to a New York Times report.
This summer, shipments of goods began to catch fire at German, British and Polish airports and warehouses. Washington and the Europeans believed the Russians were responsible.
In August, the White House grew concerned that the Russians were also planning to bring their sabotage to the U.S., according to secretly obtained intelligence.
The challenge is how to warn Putin, who has not spoken to Biden since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
During the briefings in the room, Biden’s aides reviewed conversations between senior officials from the Russian military’s intelligence agency, the GRU, who described how customer product shipments caught fire, such as a small electronic massager, on a trial basis, according to the New York Times.
After the Russians figured out how the packages made it past screening procedures and how long they took to ship, the plan was to send them on planes to the U.S. and Canada, where they would lead to fires after being unloaded.
The biggest fear was cargo planes, but passenger planes carry smaller packages in their holds if space is available.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the newspaper that “the risk of a catastrophic error is evident, as those devices could catch fire on a fully loaded plane. “
Mayorkas put in place new screening restrictions on cargo bound for the U.S. in August. When the warnings once again arose in October, Mayorkas pushed the executives at the largest airlines flying into the U.S. to take further measures to make sure there wasn’t a disaster in the middle of a flight. Some of the measures reached the public eye, while some didn’t.
White House officials were unclear whether Putin had ordered the plot or was even aware of it. It was conceivable that he would not have been informed, but at the time a great effort was made to pressure him to prevent it.
Just as when the United States thought Russia was contemplating a nuclear weapon in Ukraine in October 2022, Biden sent in national security advisor Jake Sullivan and the CIA. Director William Burns will have to warn Putin’s aides. Several avenues were needed to ensure that the message reached Putin, a senior official told the newspaper.
The warning said that if Russia’s sabotage resulted in a mass casualty event in the air or on the ground, the United States would consider Russia guilty of “enabling terrorism. ” Although Sullivan and Burns did not specify what form the reaction would take, they stated that it would mean that the shadow war between Russia and the United States would reach new heights.
The shadow war continues every day, and Russia is said to be trying to use sabotage to break the will of NATO countries towards Ukraine, but without this leading to a war with NATO itself. even.
It has led to a new way of life in Europe, ending the feeling of security that came after the Cold War. The search for possible acts of sabotage goes on every hour at airports, seaports, and below the surface, as well as on the streets of large European cities.
But the fires across Europe have stopped for now, with the message getting through to the Russian leader, officials told The New York Times. What remains unknown is whether Putin halted the plots or for how long they may remain on pause. Officials also told the paper that it’s possible that Russia is simply using the time to build better devices.
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