🇺🇸🇩🇪 The USA and Germany foiled a Russian plot to kill the CEO of Rheinmetall, who is sending weapons to Ukraine, CNN writes .

This potential assassination attempt was one of a series of Russian plans to assassinate defense industry executives across Europe who supported Ukraine's war effort.😧

"When the Americans learned of this effort, they informed Germany, whose security services were then able to protect Papperger and foil the plan."
- the material says.

The plan to kill Armin Papperger, "a white-haired goliath" who has led the German manufacturing charge in support of Kyiv, was the most mature.

For more than six months, Russia has been carrying out a sabotage campaign across Europe, largely by proxy. It has recruited local amateurs for everything from arson attacks on warehouses linked to arms for Ukraine to petty acts of vandalism — all designed to stymie the flow of weapons from the West to Ukraine and blunt public support for Kyiv. But the intelligence suggesting that Russia was willing to assassinate private citizens underlined to Western officials just how far Moscow was willing to go in a parallel shadow war it is waging across the west.

The series of plots, not previously reported, helps explain the increasingly strident warnings from NATO officials about the seriousness of the sabotage campaign — one that some senior officials believe risks crossing the threshold into armed conflict in eastern Europe.

“We’re seeing sabotage, we’re seeing assassination plots, we’re seeing arson. We’re seeing things that have a cost in human lives,” a senior NATO official told reporters on Tuesday. “I believe very much that we’re seeing a campaign of covert sabotage activities from Russia that have strategic consequences.”