Armin Papperger runs a German defense company arming Ukraine. The efforts have brought the weapons supplier unprecedented riches, and put a target on his back.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Papperger declined to comment on the plot to kill him, about which much remains unresolved. [...] Even before the arson, the German government had quietly boosted Papperger’s security to a level equaling that of the German chancellor. This happened earlier than has been previously reported. Today, Papperger is surrounded by bodyguards 24/7. Two armed guards with machine guns are stationed outside Rheinmetall’s modern glass office headquarters in Düsseldorf, alongside two police vans. His white brick home in a wealthy suburb also has two police officers armed with machine guns, a police van and a police booth out front. Multiple guards typically accompany him to lunch or meetings.
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Perhaps Papperger’s boldest move was to try to invest in Ukraine itself. When Ukrainian officials began talking to the company in 2022 about setting up local manufacturing, Rheinmetall executives were initially reluctant because of security concerns, a person familiar with the situation says. But in March 2023, Papperger arrived in Kyiv to strike a deal, meeting with Zelenskiy in his ornate gold-trimmed presidential office on heavily fortified Bankova Street in the capital’s center. Dressed in jeans and a hoodie in bright blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, Papperger spoke with Zelenskiy about creating local production capacity.
Two months later the company signed an agreement to create a joint venture with Ukraine’s state-owned arms conglomerate, Ukroboronprom. It took months to hammer out the details, in part because Rheinmetall was demanding 51% control. When the deal was finally formalized at the end of 2023, the two parties agreed to focus initially on a maintenance hub for military vehicles in Western Ukraine. But in March 2024, Papperger went further, trumpeting plans to build four factories inside Ukraine producing ammunition, military vehicles, gunpowder and antiaircraft weapons. “It is a matter close to our hearts to do everything we can to support Ukraine in its fight for survival,” Papperger said.
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Russia has frequently hired criminals to carry out attacks, many of which involve setting fire to something. In the UK a warehouse in East London storing humanitarian aid for Ukraine was set on fire; in Poland a fire destroyed a large mall; in Latvia three men were imprisoned for throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia.
Last summer, US intelligence agencies learned the GRU had hired proxies to plant incendiary devices disguised in shipments of electric massagers sent via DHL’s air freight network. A device at a DHL cargo facility in the eastern German city of Leipzig exploded. Another cargo package triggered a fire at a DHL warehouse in the UK. US intelligence officials believed the parcels, all sent from Lithuania, were a GRU test run to potentially target cargo flights to North America. US officials warned Russia privately of the risk of escalation.
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Arson is one of a wide range of tactics intended to annoy, disrupt and fuel fear. The use of drones is another. German authorities have suspected Russian espionage is behind a series of mysterious drones flying over military sites, including over Rheinmetall’s Unterlüss site.
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The aim of all these varied active measures is to stoke divisions in the West and undermine support for continued aid to Ukraine by increasing the cost. The signature that unites them is they fall just below the threshold that would provoke a military response, while also allowing for plausible deniability.
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Germany has proved to be especially fertile ground for Russian intelligence agencies hunting for operatives or proxies-for-hire. Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor to the KGB, and other agencies have been able to recruit from the many Russians who’ve emigrated to Germany over the years. “The FSB has a large network of permanent or occasional informants among Russians in Germany,” says Gerhard Conrad, a former senior officer in the BND, Germany’s federal intelligence agency, who headed the European Union’s Intelligence and Situation Centre until 2019. “They must have hundreds or even thousands of names they can approach and potentially activate for support.” Russia’s efforts were made all the easier when the BND stopped counterintelligence operations in the 1990s. It restarted them only in 2017.
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Putin’s regime has openly threatened to attack Rheinmetall. In October 2024, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a Rheinmetall repair facility in Ukraine was “certainly” a legitimate target for the Russian military. Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has meanwhile postured aggressively against hybrid warfare, calling out the Kremlin publicly for it. “We are already being attacked by Russia,” he said following a recent NATO summit.
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Less than two months after the arson attack, Papperger made another trip to Ukraine, to the Rheinmetall facility for repairing armored vehicles near the Polish border. This time he came with several armored SUVs and bodyguards and wore a bulletproof vest. He had lunch with Ukrainian officials and left after a couple of hours.
Papperger has tried to spearhead the consolidation of Europe’s defense industry, which remains fragmented as national governments continue to mostly procure weapons independently. “Contracts have to become European,” Papperger told an industry forum in Brussels in July. “We invest billions, but the coordination is not there yet.”
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Last year, Papperger signed an agreement to build an ammunition factory in Lithuania, where Germany, in its first foreign deployment since World War II, is establishing a new NATO brigade that will eventually comprise almost 5,000 soldiers. Rheinmetall also entered into a joint venture with Italian defense company Leonardo SpA to create what Papperger called “a new heavyweight in European tank production.” And he moved to bolster the company’s foothold in the US, agreeing to pay almost $1 billion for Michigan-based Loc Performance Products, a vehicle specialist, in a play for a Pentagon program worth an estimated $45 billion to build the successor to the M2 Bradley fighting vehicle.
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Rheinmetall remains a target. In April a hacker group allegedly linked to Russia claimed to have gained access to 750 gigabytes of data from the company and published a link on the dark web to download 1,400 documents on Puma tanks, engines and computers. Rheinmetall said the material was nonsensitive and from five years ago. Papperger said in his email that cyberattacks “are a constant threat for all of us.”
In May, Papperger secretly arrived in Latvia on a German government plane and was escorted through the capital, Riga, in an unmarked motorcade for talks with officials about producing defense equipment locally. It was the latest, and likely not the last, trip under a cloud of heavy security to boost Europe’s weapons industry—and to show that Rheinmetall is undeterred by Russian threats.
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“We have significantly ramped up our security measures,” he [said]. “I feel safe.”