🟩 EUROPE IS DISMANTLING RUSSIA’S DIPLOMATIC OPERATING SPACE
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski says Russia maintains more than 2,000 diplomats across the European Union—and estimates that at least 40% perform activities incompatible with diplomatic status
According to Sikorski, these diplomatic missions operate networks connected to agencies carrying out sabotage and what he described as terrorist activities inside European countries.
Embassies and consulates provide intelligence officers with access, communications and diplomatic protections. Reducing Russia’s diplomatic presence would therefore mean more than cutting political contact—it could remove part of the infrastructure Moscow uses to recruit operatives, coordinate intermediaries and conceal hostile activities.
That concern is no longer theoretical. European investigators have connected Russian intelligence to suspected arson, parcel-bomb operations, attacks on warehouses and transport infrastructure, intimidation of defense executives and the attempted explosive-drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport. Investigations have stretched from Germany and the Baltic states to Poland, the Czech Republic and Britain.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot drew an important distinction: “The Russian people are suffering under Putin’s imperialist and colonial decisions. We must distinguish between the regime that is driving its country into the abyss and the Russian population.”
Europe is not severing itself from ordinary Russians. It is beginning to close the space in which Putin’s state has operated under diplomatic cover.
Sanctions have restricted Russia’s finances, travel and trade. Diplomatic expulsions and consulate closures are now diminishing another of Moscow’s remaining instruments of influence. Russia is not yet isolated from the world—but across Europe, the doors available to its intelligence services are steadily being shut.