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Russia’s Federal Security Service is claiming that Western spy agencies broke into the phones of Russian officials and anyone else who handles classified material.

Getting into it: In a statement Tuesday, the FSB said the targets ran from Russian diplomats and politicians to senior officers and journalists, and that once a phone was cracked, foreign spies could listen in on whatever was happening around it and haul off huge amounts of data. According to the agency, the way in was a zero-day vulnerability, the kind of bug a software maker doesn’t even know exists yet, and the case traces back to 2023, when the Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab caught something strange happening on its employees’ Apple devices. The FSB also leaned on the scale of it, saying the volume of intercepted data is now so big that a roomful of people couldn’t have worked through it a few years back, while AI can crunch it in minutes.

Russia framed the alleged operation as part of a long American surveillance campaign, pointing to the decades the US has spent building cyber-espionage infrastructure (particularly since the post-9/11 Patriot Act gave intelligence agencies broad powers over IT companies) and noting that US spying hasn’t been limited to rivals, citing the 2013 revelation that Washington had tapped then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone.

The accusation cuts both ways, though, as Western agencies say it’s Russia that has grown far more aggressive. Three senior European intelligence officials told the Associated Press that Moscow is ramping up espionage in an effort to steal Western technology and defense secrets as sanctions choke its wartime economy.

The threat has also hit home in the US, where hackers, including Russian actors, breached the federal judiciary’s electronic case-filing system, potentially exposing sensitive data across multiple states by exploiting vulnerabilities first discovered back in 2020. At the time, officials raised concern that the breach could let Latin American drug cartels identify and target witnesses in criminal cases. Trump, for his part, shrugged off Russia’s role, saying, “They hack in, that’s what they do. They’re good at it, we’re good at it, we’re actually better at it.”