The Russian Plot to Kill a German CEO

On a clear night at the end of April 2024, arsonists slipped into a tidy residential neighborhood in Hermannsburg, a German village of about 8,000 people surrounded by flat farm fields, heathland nature reserves and military bases. Under the cover of darkness, they arrived at a large redbrick home, where they set fire to a clapboard garden house and a towering beech tree out front. They escaped undetected before the fire brigade arrived. Neighbors awoke the next morning to the smell of still-smoldering wood.

The home belonged to Armin Papperger, the chief executive officer of Rheinmetall AG, Germany’s largest defense company. Papperger, a stocky, white-haired 62-year-old engineer, wasn’t home at the time. In fact, he hadn’t been there since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, local residents say. The war had made Papperger a busy man: He was turning a sleeping industrial giant into an international defense juggernaut on track to bring in almost €10 billion ($11.6 billion) in revenue that year. Rheinmetall had already provided Ukraine with armored vehicles, military trucks and ammunition, and Papperger had recently announced plans to set up four weapons production sites inside the country.

An anonymous letter soon surfaced on a left-wing internet platform claiming responsibility for the arson attack. The letter lambasted Rheinmetall for profiting from Russia’s invasion and ended with a curious demand: to free from jail a former member of the Red Army Faction, or RAF, a militant group that murdered prominent German businesspeople and public figures in the 1970s and 1980s, including the CEO of Deutsche Bank in 1989. “His place of retreat is not safe,” the anonymous perpetrators wrote of Papperger.

A few months later, CNN revealed that US intelligence agencies had warned Germany earlier in the year that Russia was preparing to kill Papperger, the most advanced of a series of plans to kill defense industry executives across Europe. The story did not mention the arson attack—which appeared to be an act of intimidation rather than an actual targeting of the CEO—but people familiar with the situation said the assassination plot involving Russian proxies was active at the time it occurred. The arsonists were never caught, leaving their possible involvement in the wider scheme a mystery.

Bloomberg's senior writer Stephanie Baker explains how Rheinmetall's CEO Armin Papperger was targeted as a key figure rearming Europe.

This January, James Appathurai, who headed NATO’s response to hybrid warfare, publicly confirmed during a session of the European Parliament that Russia was plotting to kill Papperger. “All indications are that the Russians have a much higher appetite to risk the lives of our citizens, and a very substantial response from us, to achieve their aims,” Appathurai told Bloomberg Businessweek before becoming interim managing director of the alliance’s defense innovation accelerator in July.

The targeting of Papperger represented a new frontier, even when compared with Russia’s long-established and well-documented history of violence against enemies living on foreign soil. Before the war, Moscow had focused attacks on its “near abroad”—Baltic states and former members of the Soviet bloc—or on Russians it viewed as traitors. The attempted poisoning in 2018 of Sergei Skripal in England showed Russia’s willingness to use a banned chemical in a NATO country, risking civilian casualties. But Skripal was a Russian colonel who’d spied for the UK—not the CEO of a major Western defense company.

After the invasion of Ukraine, Russian hybrid warfare—not just assassinations but also sabotage, disinformation and covert attacks on critical infrastructure—accelerated sharply, reaching a fever pitch last year. During the Cold War, these techniques were known as “active measures.” Analysts say the volume and intensity of the tactics was greater during the Ukraine war’s first three years than in the heyday of the Soviet Union, though the pace has slowed in 2025.

--------

Watch Bloomberg Radio LIVE on YouTube

Weekdays 7am-6pm ET

Follow us on X

Subscribe to our Podcasts:

Bloomberg Daybreak

Bloomberg Surveillance

Bloomberg Intelligence

Balance of Power

Bloomberg Businessweek

Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app:

Apple CarPlay

Android Auto

Visit our YouTube channels:

Bloomberg Podcasts

Bloomberg Television

Bloomberg Originals