A week ago a Berlin court accused Russia of “state terrorism”. Germany then expelled two diplomats. Now Russia is realizing its threat and responding equally.
After the verdict in the so-called Tiergartenmord trial last Wednesday, Russia has now declared two German diplomats to be “undesirable persons”. This was announced by the Foreign Ministry on Monday in Moscow after a conversation with Ambassador Géza Andreas von Geyr. The move is in response to the deportation of two Russian embassy employees in Berlin. 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 perspective of the federal government it is completely unfounded,” said a statement.
Russia criticized “unfriendly acts of Berlin”
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 verdict 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.
As a consequence, the German government declared two employees of the Russian embassy in Berlin to be “undesirable persons”. This was tantamount to expulsion. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) spoke of 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.
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 due, among other things, to the largest cyber attack to date on the Bundestag in 2015, for which Russian hackers are held responsible, the poisoning of the Kremlin critic Alexej Navalny and, most recently, the Russian troop deployment on the border with Ukraine.
Source From: Stern
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