The 26-year-old Russian-Ukrainian was arrested in his hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport on June 3, after an accident while making explosives. He was planning to target a hardware store north of Paris, as part of a sabotage campaign orchestrated by Moscow.
If the best that a vast Russian sabotage campaign can do is to send idiots to try making TATP in a hotel room, they’re worse off than I thought. The only advantage that stuff has is that it’s very easy to make, but if you’re in a position to need things to be that easy you’re not in a position to control it well enough to avoid having it blow up in your hands. And aside from losing some fingers it’s not really something you want to do in a hotel room where everyone’s going to hear the loud bang and your screams of pain.
If it’s any kind of campaign it’s stochastic terrorism, I guess.