For its part, the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin did not speak of the expulsion of Russian diplomats, but it said on Saturday that the federal government and the Russian side “have been in contact over the past few weeks on questions of staffing the respective foreign missions”. “Today’s flight is related to this,” it said.
After the start of the Russian military offensive in Ukraine last year, Berlin and Moscow had already expelled diplomats from each other. In addition to Germany, France, Italy, Spain and other countries have also declared Russian embassy staff to be undesirable. In some cases, this was explicitly justified with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in other cases it was about allegations of espionage. For its part, Moscow reacted by expelling numerous Western diplomats.
