The head of Sweden’s intelligence service told AFP Tuesday that there was a “risk” that an already serious security situation would continue to deteriorate, pointing primarily to a threat from Russia.
Charlotte von Essen said Russia had conducted “security-threatening activities against Sweden and in Sweden” for a number of years.
“This involves everything from intelligence gathering, influence operations, and illegal technology acquisition. But it also involves sabotage activities,” she added.
There had also been sabotage in the Baltic states and in Germany, said von Essen, head of the Swedish Security Service (Sapo).
But amid recurring reports of suspected drone flights, she cautioned about attributing too much to Russia.
“One might get the impression that Sweden has been subjected to extensive hybrid activities,” von Essen said, saying her service did not share “that view”.
Some of the drone sightings had not checked out and some suspected sabotage had turned out to have been things like break-ins related to more traditional crime.
Von Essen insisted that some activities, such as cyberattacks, could still be linked to “foreign powers”.
“We need to be careful before we speculate and draw conclusions, because Russia is not behind everything,” von Essen said.
Attributing too much to foreign powers risked playing into their hands and could lead to a misallocation of resources.
Apart from Russia, von Essen said that both China and Iran posed threats to Swedish security.
“We’ve previously pointed out that Iran uses criminal networks in Sweden as proxies to carry out attacks here to achieve its objectives,” she said.
When it came to China, the threat was mostly about Chinese attempts to access Swedish research “in order to build, among other things, its own military capability.”
Last week von Essen decided to keep the terrorist threat assessment at an “elevated” level — keeping it at three on a five point scale.
It has been at that level since May last year, when it was lowered from four.
Sapo had raised the level to four in August 2023, after a slew of protests involving Koran burnings and desecrations had made the country a “prioritised target”.
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