DGermany has expelled around 50 Russian spies disguised as diplomats from the country. The FAZ learned from government circles that it was a “medium two-digit number”. This is Berlin’s reaction to active Russian espionage in Germany. On Saturday, a Russian Ilyushin II 96-300 aircraft from Moscow landed in Berlin with a special permit to pick up the secret service employees disguised as diplomats. The plane landed back in the Russian capital in the afternoon.
The Moscow Foreign Ministry reacted apparently outraged, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova spoke of a “mass” expulsion of Russian diplomats. These are new “hostile actions” against Russia. In return, “more than 20” German diplomats would be expelled. The Foreign Office rejected this representation, but confirmed the aim of the action.
“In fact, in the past few weeks the federal government has been holding talks with the Russian side on the presence at the respective foreign missions with the aim of reducing the Russian intelligence presence in Germany,” the office said. A government spokesman said on Monday that Germany was in talks with the Russian side about reducing the diplomatic staff, but did not provide any further information.
Spies with criminal immunity
It’s no news that Russian intelligence services continue to spy in this country at Cold War levels. Moscow has always used agents disguised as diplomats for this purpose. Anyone dealing with a cultural attaché or an embassy secretary may actually meet a man or woman from the Russian service. At the beginning of the year, around 540 diplomats were accredited at the Russian embassy on Unter den Linden.
According to estimates by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a third are actually secret service agents disguised as diplomats, which would correspond to a number of around 180. They work for the foreign service SWR, the military service GRU, but also for the domestic service FSB, for which a total of around 350,000 people work. If agents are accredited as diplomats, they enjoy criminal immunity, i.e. they cannot be prosecuted for their espionage activities in Germany.
Before the start of the war of aggression in Ukraine, the Merkel government had only hesitantly reacted to Russian espionage activities. This happened not only out of naivety, but also out of the calculation that an additional confrontation with Moscow should be avoided. In addition, Russia always reacts to the expulsion of diplomats in a “mirrored manner” by expelling the same number of German embassy employees. Above all, Moscow is quickly replacing the positions of those who have been expelled with new spies in diplomatic guise. The Federal Foreign Office has therefore decided to fundamentally reduce the number of accredited diplomats. The German embassy in Moscow has been talking to the Russian side about this for weeks.
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