German police are hunting saboteurs after two separate attacks knocked out power infrastructure hundreds of miles apart within the same 24-hour stretch, an assault officials say bears the hallmarks of state-directed sabotage rather than coincidence.

The first strike hit before dawn on Tuesday at the Turnow-Preilack substation in Brandenburg, a critical high-voltage node feeding the giant Jänschwalde lignite power plant into Germany's 50Hertz transmission grid. Investigators recovered more than a dozen improvised explosive devices at the site, which they say were fired at overhead cables in an apparent attempt to trigger a blackout. Brandenburg's interior minister, Jan Redmann, called it a calculated act of sabotage that "required substantial preparation," adding that authorities "cannot rule out the possibility that foreign powers are behind it."

Hours later, a second attack unfolded 400 miles west at a substation near Bergheim, close to Cologne. There, unidentified attackers rigged conductive material over high-voltage lines to deliberately trigger a short circuit, throwing bright flashes along the cables. Police say they found six launch devices, rigged with pyrotechnics to hoist a wire over the lines, hidden in a nearby cornfield. The disruption forced grid operator RWE to take five coal-fired generating units, with a combined capacity of 4,200 megawatts, offline. Three were expected back online by Wednesday, with the remaining two not returning until the weekend.

"Attacking our economy"

North Rhine-Westphalia's interior minister, Herbert Reul, said investigators were weighing two theories: a foreign state operation or domestic left-wing extremism, though he stressed the pattern was becoming impossible to ignore.

"A substation is the nerve center of our daily lives... they're attacking our country, our economy, our daily lives," Reul told reporters, adding that the country was seeing "more sabotage, more hybrid attacks — interference like this is not happening far away, it's happening right on our doorstep."

Neither attack caused widespread blackouts for households, but the near-simultaneous timing has alarmed a government already on edge. The sabotage broke hours after Berlin formally accused Russia of orchestrating an explosive-laden drone attack on Leipzig/Halle airport last month, naming two suspects — a Latvian national of Russian origin and a Russian national from Belarus — and announcing it would close Russia's consulate general in Bonn and sever ties with a Russian cultural center in Berlin. The European Union's foreign policy chief has separately described the drone incident as bearing the marks of "state-sponsored terrorism."

Moscow denies any involvement in the grid sabotage or the drone incident. Russia's foreign ministry summoned Germany's charge d'affaires in Moscow the same day to protest what it called "anti-Russian actions," dismissing Berlin's allegations as "unsubstantiated and absurd."

German security officials in both regions are now comparing notes to determine whether the Brandenburg and Bergheim attacks are linked, and whether either connects to a string of earlier incidents, including attacks on high-voltage lines near Berlin in January that were initially blamed on left-wing extremists. Federal prosecutors have opened a terrorism investigation into the Brandenburg blast, and NRW police are treating Bergheim as premeditated criminal sabotage. No arrests have been announced in either case. With Germany's domestic intelligence agency already warning of an escalating campaign of hybrid attacks tied to the Ukraine war, officials say securing the country's power grid ahead of winter has become an urgent priority.