The air freight industry is on high alert after fires at DHL warehouses were linked to Russian sabotage operations

Suspected Russian sabotage activities targeting the air freight industry have been on the rise this year, and the industry is preparing for further action.

Brandon Fried, the executive director of the Airforwarders Association, which represents US air cargo companies, told Business Insider that the industry had been on high alert since 9/11.

"So regardless of who is perpetrating this, whether it's another country or whether it's a terrorist organization, our industry has been vigilant for quite some time," he said, referencing two fires at DHL warehouses earlier this year that have been linked to Russia.

"They want to cause fear and panic, but we, as a community, are not going to let them. One of our overriding messages is that we're vigilant," Fried said.

Western officials have said the fires, which took place at two DHL sites in the UK and Germany in July, may have been part of Russian sabotage operations that ultimately aimed to target North America, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.

One package caught fire before being loaded onto a plane at a DHL freight center in Leipzig, eastern Germany, while a similar incident took place at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham in the UK.

Thomas Haldenwang, the president of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, said in October that it was a "lucky coincidence" that the package in Leipzig caught fire on the ground and not during the flight.

Haldenwang did not explicitly blame Moscow, but the German news agency DPA reported that security services were working on the assumption that the attack was connected to Russia, per the Financial Times .

A police spokesperson told BI that counterterrorism officers were leading an investigation into the Birmingham incident and working to identify any links to similar incidents across the continent.

The Wall Street Journal report said the fires were caused by electric massagers implanted with a magnesium-based flammable substance.

The devices that ignited in the UK were traced to Lithuania, where officials say they appear to have been part of a wider Russian plot to get such devices on planes to North America, the Journal reported.

Frank Umbach, a research director at the European Cluster for Climate, Energy, and Resource Security at the University of Bonn, said that Russian hybrid warfare had escalated from spying on critical infrastructure to active sabotage across the whole of Europe.

"Hybrid warfare has intensified here in Europe, particularly against Germany," Umbach said, adding that there was concern that German intelligence services had been "heavily penetrated" by Russian agents.

Moscow has already been linked to a number of sabotage incidents in Europe this year, including arson attempts and a reported plan to kill the CEO of the German arms firm Rheinmetall, which has made munitions and military equipment for Ukraine.

Russia is suspected of using social media platforms such as Telegram to recruit proxies to carry out such activities.

Speaking a few months after the DHL fires, the chief of the UK's MI6 intelligence service, Richard Moore, said he believed Russian intelligence services had "gone a bit feral."

And experts think it's unlikely such incidents will stop any time soon.

Shashank Joshi, a former senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute who is now the defense editor at The Economist, told BI that he believed the suspected Russian sabotage operations were part of a "pretty broad-brush campaign" that could see the Kremlin target any EU or NATO member.

"I don't think that anyone is particularly immune as such," Joshi said.

A spokesperson for Germany's Military Counterintelligence Service, known as BAMAD, said that the German military and NATO forces in Germany "continue to be a priority target for Russian espionage activities."

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied Russia's involvement in sabotage operations in Europe.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence services, and the BND declined to comment further.

Western officials say Moscow has also launched cyberattacks and sought to spread disinformation as part of its alleged sabotage operations.

Russian state media sites like RT have already faced sanctions in the US and the EU over allegations of disinformation.

Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Program, said that Russian disinformation campaigns, espionage operations, and sabotage attempts were "intimately interlinked."

"Objectives in the information domain can be served by kinetic actions and vice versa," Giles said. "The information component of warfare is seen as an integral part and interdependent with all of the other activities that Russia is undertaking."

"That's something that's played out very clearly in Russia's war on Ukraine after the full-scale invasion," he added.