In a nutshell
A months-long joint investigation by POLITICO and WELT, published recently, reveals that the January 2026 Berlin blackout we covered earlier was not an isolated act but part of a sustained sabotage campaign against German critical infrastructure. Federal Criminal Police data cited in the report records 321 sabotage incidents nationwide in 2025, with the third quarter alone accounting for 94 cases. In North Rhine-Westphalia, authorities attribute 425 of 445 attacks on the energy grid since 2019 to perpetrators motivated by far-left ideology.
The reporters trace what they describe as a loose, decentralized milieu rather than a single organization, structured around publications such as the Capulcu collective’s manifesto Disconnect and the anarchist magazine Zündlumpen, which has reportedly published operational guidance for sabotage. The investigation also documents the harrowing experience of Andreas Thomsen, an ALS patient whose ventilator nearly ran out of battery during the January outage. Notably, while Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has publicly raised the possibility of Russian involvement, the report cites an internal Federal Police analysis from autumn 2025 that found no evidence to substantiate foreign state direction.
Our Take
The picture emerging from this investigation sharpens, rather than changes, the warning we issued in January: the threat to critical infrastructure is not episodic, and it is increasingly homegrown. What this reporting adds is a clearer view of the ideology-to-action pipeline: texts requiring resistance “by force, if necessary,” followed within months by arson against power lines that nearly cost a vulnerable citizen his life.
This is precisely the dynamic our framework is designed to name: legitimate disagreement about technology policy, surveillance, or industrial development being weaponized into the disruption of services on which others depend for survival. The energy grid does not become a defensible political target because one group has redefined it as complicit in a contested ideology. That reasoning, applied consistently, would justify the politicization of every critical institution.
Two implications deserve our audience’s attention. First, a public discourse that treats infrastructure attacks primarily as a foreign threat risks misdiagnosing a problem with significant domestic roots, as Germany’s own internal analyses appear to acknowledge. Second, the gap between a decade of investigation and the limited results to date suggests Europe needs a more serious conversation about how democracies protect critical institutions without overreaching into the speech and association rights that those same democracies are bound to uphold. Attack Surface Reduction is not a slogan; it is the operational discipline democracies will need if they want to avoid choosing between vulnerability and overreach.
