After Baerbock's exclamation mark: Putin government counters "unfriendly act"

Created: 12/22/2021, 09:38 AM

A Berlin court accuses Russia of state terrorism, and Germany expels two diplomats.

Now Putin's government is reacting to the "unfriendly act".

Moscow / Berlin - The atmosphere between Germany and Russia remains frosty on the diplomatic floor.

Moscow has now responded to the deportation of two Russian embassy employees in Berlin with a return coach.

The concrete stumbling block is currently the so-called Tiergarten murder and the following process in the German capital.

After the verdict last Wednesday, Russia has now declared two German diplomats to be "undesirable people".

The Foreign Ministry announced on Monday in Moscow after a conversation with Ambassador Géza Andreas von Geyr.

The Ministry in Moscow had previously criticized the Berlin judgment as politically motivated.

The Foreign Office in Berlin criticized the decision.

"This step does not come as a surprise, but from the point of view of the federal government it is completely unfounded," it said in a press release.

Baerbock took action: two diplomats expelled - Russia replies to "unfriendly act"

Because of the shooting of a Georgian in August 2019 in the Kleiner Tiergarten park, the Berlin Court of Appeal had sentenced a Russian to life imprisonment last Wednesday.

The judgment speaks of “state terrorism”: The judges are convinced that the now 56-year-old acted on behalf of Russian state agencies.

Russia rejects such allegations.

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock at the meeting of the “Stockholm Initiative” on nuclear disarmament.

© Michael Kappeler / dpa

As a consequence, the federal government declared two employees of the Russian embassy in Berlin to be "undesirable persons".

This was tantamount to expulsion.

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) * saw a "serious violation of German law and the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany".

The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Sakharova, then spoke of "unfriendly actions by Berlin" that could not go unanswered.

Russia: Crimea, cyber attack, Navalny - relations with Germany have been strained for years

The federal government had expelled two employees of the Russian embassy during the investigation into the "zoo murder" and justified this with a lack of willingness to cooperate on the part of Russian authorities.

Moscow responded by expelling two German diplomats.

German-Russian relations have deteriorated steadily since Russia took over the Ukrainian Crimea in 2014.

This was ensured, among other things, by the largest cyber attack to date on the Bundestag in 2015, for which Russian hackers are blamed, the poisoning of the Kremlin critic Alexej Navalny * and, most recently, the Russian troop deployment on the border with Ukraine *.

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