Western governments mounted an unprecedented and coordinated fightback Thursday against "brazen" attempts by Russia to meddle in international affairs, publicly unmasking alleged intelligence agents and blaming Moscow for a series of audacious cyberattacks.
The Dutch government accused Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, of targeting the world's chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), through a foiled cyber operation.
Hours earlier, Britain, backed by close intelligence allies Australia and New Zealand, pointed the finger at the GRU for carrying out a worldwide campaign of "malicious" cyberattacks, including the hacking of the US Democratic National Committee in 2016.
The US Justice Department, meanwhile, announced criminal charges against seven Russian intelligence officers, accusing them in a sprawling indictment of hacking, wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering as part of an effort to distract from Russia's state-sponsored sports doping program.
Four of the names given in the US indictment match those given by Dutch authorities in connection with the alleged plot against the OPCW.
The choreographed announcements by Western allies amounted to a significant escalation of tensions with Moscow.
"The GRU has interfered in free elections and pursued a hostile campaign of cyberattacks," said Peter Wilson, the British ambassador to the Netherlands. "It is an aggressive, well-funded body of the Russian state. It can no longer be allowed to act across the world... with apparent immunity."
Russia must know there is "a red line" and that "if they try to intervene in the democratic processes of other countries, they will be exposed and there will be consequences," UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said its members "stand in solidarity with the decision by the Dutch and British governments to call out Russia on its blatant attempts to undermine international law and institutions," and that the alliance would continue to strengthen its defenses against cyber threats.
The Dutch operation
Dutch officials gave unprecedented details as they outlined the alleged Russian operation at a joint Dutch-UK government news conference in The Hague.
Describing it as "very worrying," Bijleveld-Schouten said four Russian military intelligence officers were expelled on April 13, the same day the plot targeting the OPCW was detected.
They left belongings behind, she said, that also enabled the Dutch to discover that one of the agents' laptops had made connections to Brazil, Switzerland and Malaysia, trying to interfere with the investigation into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
The head of Dutch counterintelligence, Maj. Gen. Onno Eichelsheim, named the four alleged Russian officers as Aleksei Morenets and Evgenii Serebriakov -- who had consecutive passport numbers, he said -- Oleg Sotnikov and Alexey Minin.
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