The Biden administration sought to warn Russia's Vladimir Putin off after pallets of cargo from Russia burst into flames after being flown to warehouses in Europe, The New York Times reported on Monday.
"In a series of Situation Room briefings, President Biden’s top aides reviewed details of conversations among top officials of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence arm, who were describing shipments of consumer products that burst into flames — in one case, a small electronic massager — as a test run," reported David Sanger. "Once the Russians understood how the packages made it past air-cargo screening systems, and how long they took to ship, the next step appeared to be sending them on planes bound for the United States and Canada, where they would trigger fires once they were unloaded."
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Once American officials started noticing these cargo shipments appearing at warehouses in the U.K., Germany, and Poland, they scrambled to send a message to Putin warning him off of this plot.
As U.S. airports and airlines worked to contain the threat from sabotaged cargo shipments, "behind the scenes, White House officials were struggling to understand whether Mr. Putin had ordered or was aware of the plot — or if he had been kept in the dark. And a major effort was begun to warn him to end it," said the report.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William Burns used several channels to send a warning to Putin that if these shipments destroyed an aircraft or caused fires on the ground, Russia would be held responsible for "enabling terrorism" — escalating the "shadow war" that has been unfolding between the U.S. and Russia over the latter's war of conquest in Ukraine.
According to the report, these warnings resulted in the risk cooling down — but it remains unclear whether Putin actually masterminded the scheme, or it was the work of a few rogue Russian operatives looking for ways to attack NATO countries without it being perceived as an act of war.
