As of: 04/22/2023 4:21 p.m
More than 20 German diplomats have to leave Russia. This was announced by the Russian Foreign Ministry. This was a retaliatory measure for the “renewed mass expulsion” of Russian diplomats from Germany.
Russia has announced the expulsion of more than 20 German diplomats. The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, described the measure on Zvezda as a retaliatory measure for the “renewed mass expulsion of employees of the Russian diplomatic missions in Germany”. According to Zakharova, these are new “hostile actions” by Germany against Russia.
“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.
Russian government machine in Berlin
Spokeswoman Zakharova accused the German side of having pushed through the expulsion of the diplomats to the media in advance, although there had been assurances that the matter would be treated discreetly. There will be a “significant limit to the maximum number of employees in German diplomatic missions” in Russia, Zakharova said. The German Ambassador Géza Andreas von Geyr in Moscow was informed about this earlier this month.
In the 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 is unclear whether the Russian diplomats were possibly on board this machine.
The Foreign Office is keeping a low profile
At the request of ARD Capital Studios The Foreign Office in Berlin only said that the statements of the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry were noted. In the past few weeks, the federal government has held talks with Russia about the presence at the respective foreign missions, “with the aim of reducing the Russian intelligence presence in Germany”. It went on to say: “Today’s departure of Russian embassy staff is related to this.”
Diplomatic representations greatly thinned out
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.
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.