Wild exchange of versions over identity of Berlin grid saboteurs

~ Josie Ó Súileabháin ~

A mass power-outage affected 45,000 homes in Berlin in the first days of 2026, after an arson attack against high voltage power lines across the Teltow Canal severed the city from a steam turbine power plant. Days later, a letter of confession was released to both German media and Berlin police in which the Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) claimed responsibility for the attack. The group expressed  “sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused to the less affluent and vulnerable members of the population” but asserted that “the sabotage of the gas-fired power plant is, among other things, a necessary measure against the expansion of fossil gas power plants in Germany”.

Only a few days later, however, another letter was published by a group that claimed to be the original Vulkangruppe, in which they distanced themselves from the sabotage. “We are speaking out because people are speaking, acting, and publishing in our name without it being our action. The texts and actions of recent years did not originate with us. They contradict what we stood for and why we acted in the first place.”

Electricity was restored on January 7, yet by this point, speculation over the identities of the saboteurs predictably spilled into outright conspiracy. The Russian government were suspected as being responsible as part of their hybrid war against Europe. According to the Institute for the Study of War, isolated events of explosions and arson were recorded last year in Poland, and four suspected saboteurs were detained in Latvia, Germany and the UK.

There was also speculation that the Russians had used AI to draft the confession letter. In it, the Vulkangruppe mentioned other attacks carried out under the same banner in the past decade: against “Adlerhof Technology Park, Tesla’s Gigafactory in 2021 and 2024, the infrastructure of the Vattenfall Reuter coal-fired power plant, and the Vodafone hub in Adlershof.” However, unlike all the claims of responsibility that came with those actions, the current letter did not mention the word “capitalism” even once, instead using the obscure term “imperial lifestyle”.

Yet for Berlin’s right-wing mayor Kai Wegner (CDU), it was an open and shut case. “It is unacceptable that once again clearly left-wing extremists are attacking our power grid and endangering lives.” Wegner spent that Saturday at his home, rather than going out to meet the affected residents without power. Iris Spranger (SPD), the Senator for the Interior, also denounced the attack, calling it a “dehumanising attack on the people of Berlin that wilfully endangers human lives.”

The Vulkangruppe was originally active following the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland in 2010, whose ash cloud led to complete paralysis of air traffic across Europe . A year later the group claimed responsibility for an arson attack at the Ostkreuz Bahnhof station in east Berlin, pointing to Deutsche Bahn’s complicity with arms exports via airfields and ports.

However, the ‘original’ group now wrote that following the 2014 Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, they had stopped acts of sabotage in Germany. “Even back then, our approach was intended to be defensive, even if it was interpreted as an attack. We wanted disruption, not escalation. Disruption of normality, not its destruction. It was about making responsibility visible, not about moralising or a logic of permanent sabotage.”

So will the real VulkanGruppe please stand up? What this story has shown is the true danger these days: our inability to know for sure what is happening and who is responsible. Letters of confession, letters of correction, letters of condemnation and distancing. Could be the Russians? Maybe a false-flag operation by the German government itself? A new VulkanGruppe? Several? In this chaos we might all become lost in the void.

“But we are confident that even in the darkness, the light is not far away,” writes the (continuation) Vulkangruppe, “When we place this action within the context of a global resistance, we are confident that we will be heard.”

Image: Volcano eruption next to Litli-Hrútur in Iceland in 2023. Giles Laurent.