European authorities sanctioned Russian intelligence units and hackers on Monday, accusing them of a 15-year campaign targeting governments and critical infrastructure across the continent.
The European Union and the U.K. said the sanctions would target Russian military intelligence officers, hackers and private companies that support the Kremlin’s cyberattacks. The authorities highlighted the role of the 16th Center of Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of Russia’s main cyber intelligence divisions, saying it was behind a failed attack on Poland’s power grid and many other disruptive operations.
“The Russian state is sinking to new lows in its attempts to undermine European security,” said U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper.
The sanctions hit as members of the “coalition of the willing”—a group of mainly European nations that are backing Ukraine—is set to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris on Monday evening.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has intensified its efforts to spy on European governments and destabilize their economies, using a suite of operations from cyberwarfare to drone surveillance.
A flurry of drone activity near sensitive sites across central Europe and the Balkans over the past year was likely directed by the Kremlin, using its “shadow fleet” of oil tankers to launch and land the drones, analysts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hans Seidel Foundation wrote in a report this month.
“The Kremlin’s success rests on a basic strategic insight: Europe’s air-defence architecture was designed to detect and defeat conventional air threats operating in a recognizable battlespace. It was not built for, by comparison, relatively low-cost (drones),” they wrote.
France said it was repeatedly targeted by attacks, going back to at least 2017. The targets included an institute specialized in sensitive technologies backed by the minister of defense, networks of the defense and foreign affairs ministries, and an entity in France’s judicial sector. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he would summon Russia’s ambassador in France in the coming days.
The U.K. said it would sanction 24 individuals and entities behind the cyber campaign, including senior officials in Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, and a Russian media company called Rybar that the U.K. said had attempted to influence elections in Moldova and Armenia. The U.K. also announced sanctions against hackers responsible for Lumma Stealer, malware that sucks up sensitive information from devices it infects.
“The U.K. can reveal that Russia has used Lumma Stealer’s stolen credentials to conduct cyber espionage operations against targets globally to support the Kremlin’s objectives,” the U.K. foreign ministry said.
Write to Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com