Leipzig airport sabotage: trail leads to GRU colonel Smolyaninov

The attempted sabotage at Leipzig/Halle airport in early August was organized by people from the circle of GRU colonel Denis Smolyaninov, according to the investigative outlet The Insider. The outlet claims to have direct evidence of Russian military intelligence involvement. German authorities blame Russia for preparing the sabotage.

A meeting in Moscow and the recruitment of perpetrators

The Insider traces the preparations to a cold January morning in 2026, when Smolyaninov was strolling through Moscow with a knife-throwing instructor and Orthodox church deacon Vladimir Trofimov, and arms dealer Andrei Usachov. The outlet published a photograph of all three. Smolyaninov has previously been named in connection with the recruitment of Russian agents in Ukraine.

About six months later, judging by recorded phone calls, Usachov contacted an acquaintance from Pskov, Oleg Levushkin. This small-time entrepreneur and motorcyclist had one key advantage for the organizers: Latvian citizenship, which allowed him to move freely around the European Union. British media have also written earlier about the roles of Smolyaninov and Levushkin in the Leipzig sabotage.

Traces lead to Łódź

According to investigators, Levushkin's accomplice and the direct perpetrator of the failed operation was Andrei Karshakov, a Belarusian citizen living in Russia. German media have reported that traces of Karshakov's DNA were found on an antenna that investigators believe amplified the drone's signal while the operator guided it to its target.

It was not his first act of sabotage. Two years ago, the outlet says, he took part in an arson attack in the Polish city of Łódź: on 25 July 2024, a shelf of plant protection products and insecticides caught fire in a Leroy Merlin hypermarket. Firefighters put out the blaze within an hour, the cause was then attributed to a breach of storage rules, and the incident drew almost no attention.

Later, intelligence services noticed two suspicious people who had been in Łódź at the time of the fire. They were identified from video showing them withdrawing cash from a local ATM. One was Karshakov, the other a Belarusian named Maxim Lapunov, who had officially changed his surname but continued to use an old passport in the name of Maxim Kolosov.

Flight data suggest Lapunov may also have taken part in the Leipzig sabotage: on 19 July 2026, two weeks before the drone was discovered, he flew from St. Petersburg to Ankara and then to Belgrade. According to a security service representative from one European country, he probably travelled on from Serbia to Germany. Border crossing data show that Karshakov often travelled with other Belarusians living in Russia: Vyacheslav Aisin, former police officer Denis Shulgan and Roman Kovalevsky, previously convicted in Russia of theft and robbery.

What happened at the airport

The attempted sabotage at Leipzig/Halle airport took place on the evening of 4 August. A drone carrying explosives crashed into the wing of a parked Ukrainian An-124 cargo plane, but the charge failed to detonate. A few hours later, a bus driver found the drone. The aircraft was empty at the time, but had shortly before carried ammunition from France through Leipzig.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz