Norwegian police moves counter-hybrid training to northern frontier as Russia prepares law permitting cross-border body snatching
As Norwegian police drill for potential armed incursions from Russia, the Russian Duma is preparing to adopt a law that could legitimise armed operations abroad to free detained citizens.
Armed Response Police Units from across Norway recently gathered in the frosty wilderness just metres from the Russian border to train in high-risk operations, tactical manoeuvres and advanced marksmanship.
“The training has been located in the Kirkenes area to give personnel from the Police Armed Response Unit realistic experience in one of the country’s most demanding and strategically important operational environments,” said Trond Kristiansen of the National Police Directorate.
This is the first time national police forces have moved their winter training to Norway’s northernmost region.
“This allows us to deploy them quickly as a mobile reinforcement if the situation escalates,” Kristiansen said.
When the country is not at war, border security is handled by the police.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European officials have documented 151 incidents involving Russian-linked sabotage, arson, attempted bombings and other hybrid threats, according to a recent report by the Hague-based International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT).
Norway’s Police Security Service said in its 2026 threat assessment that Russia is “mapping our critical infrastructure” to identify vulnerabilities. Such information, it warned, could be “exploited for intelligence, influence and sabotage activities”.
The police exercise along the frontier was built around a scenario involving armed individuals crossing the border to carry out hostile acts in Norway.
Tarjei Sirma-Tellefsen, Chief of Staff at the Finnmark Police District, said training in the extreme winter climate helps build a police capability that can be rapidly deployed in the event of an incident at the border, on Svalbard, or elsewhere in remote wilderness areas.
The message to Russia, he said, is explicit: “It sends a clear signal to our neighbour that this is where Norway begins.”
So far, border incidents have been rare. A small number of soldiers fleeing the Russian army and paramilitary groups have crossed illegally into Norway since 2022. In 2015, Russia’s FSB facilitated the movement of around 5,500 migrants across the official border crossing between the two countries.
In recent years, jamming and spoofing of satellite navigation signals originating from Russian ground-based electronic warfare transmitters have increasingly affected civilian safety on the Norwegian side, including aviation.
Yet the situation could escalate as the Kremlin expands its hybrid toolkit.
In 2014, an Estonian border guard was abducted during a cross-border raid by Russia’s FSB that involved radio-jamming equipment and smoke grenades.
Earlier, in 2006, the Duma adopted legislation authorising Russian intelligence agencies to conduct killings abroad against individuals deemed “extremists” or threats to national security.
This week, Russia’s government commission on legislative activity approved a bill allowing the use of the armed forces “to protect Russian citizens in the event of their arrest, criminal prosecution, or other legal proceedings by foreign courts,” according to the state-controlled newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
In practice, the legislation would open the door to deploying special forces to free Russian citizens arrested or detained abroad.
“It would legitimise armed attacks on Western legal facilities, including courts and detention centres,” said investigative journalists and Russia security-service experts Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan.
They argue the legislation is most likely intended to protect figures such as Vladimir Putin, Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, all of whom are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for alleged war crimes committed during the war in Ukraine.
In an article for the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Soldatov and Borogan describe several examples of special operations carried out to free Russian citizens in Europe and the Middle East.
The new law anticipates more armed teams operating on foreign soil, effectively preparing the ground for “body-snatching” operations, the two argue.
“Moscow is preparing not for a single rescue, but for a system,” Soldatov and Borogan wrote.
