According to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, Germany has decided on a “mass” expulsion of Russian diplomats. A Moscow ministry spokeswoman announced that these were new “hostile actions” by Germany against Russia and announced countermeasures. Accordingly, German diplomats should also be expelled from Russia. It was unclear whether the Russian representatives were still being expelled or had already left the country.
“We strongly condemn this action by Berlin, which continues to demonstratively destroy the entire range of Russian-German relations, including their diplomatic dimension,” the ministry said in a statement. The German side is accused of having pushed through the expulsion of the diplomats to the media in advance, although there were assurances that the matter would be treated discreetly.
Moscow is reacting with a “significant limitation of the maximum number of employees of the German diplomatic missions” in Russia, as it is said. Specifically, 20 German diplomats have to leave Russia. The German Ambassador Géza Andreas von Geyr in Moscow was informed about this earlier this month.
For its part, the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin did not speak of the expulsion of Russian diplomats, but it said 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.
In the course of their serious tensions in the past, Germany and Russia have repeatedly expelled diplomats from each other. The representations have already been severely thinned out and the services shut down. The situation worsened significantly with the start of the Russian war against Ukraine.
On Saturday morning, a Russian government plane flew from Moscow to Berlin with special permission. The Ilyushin Il 96-300 aircraft was expected back in Moscow in the afternoon. Actually, the airspace between the EU and Russia is blocked because of the sanctions in the wake of the Ukraine war. It was not clear whether the Russian diplomats might have been on board this plane.
In April last year, Russia declared 40 German diplomats “undesirable persons” and thus ordered their expulsion. The number was equivalent to about a third of the German diplomatic corps in Russia. This, in turn, was a reaction to the expulsion of 40 Russian diplomats at the beginning of April 2022, who, according to Berlin, were said to have acted as spies in Germany. Since the Russian war of aggression began, the EU and Russia have each expelled hundreds of diplomats.
