According to a “Spiegel” report, the German security authorities have received indications that Russian secret services have spied on the training of Ukrainian soldiers on Western weapon systems in Germany.
Shortly after the start of the courses at two Bundeswehr locations, the military shielding service (MAD) noticed suspicious vehicles from which the access roads to the barracks were probably observed, the magazine reported on Friday. The locations Idar-Oberstein in Rhineland-Palatinate and Grafenwoehr in Bavaria were affected.
In Idar-Oberstein, the Bundeswehr trained Ukrainian soldiers on the Panzerhaubitze 2000, in Grafenwoehr US forces trained Ukrainians on western artillery systems. According to MAD findings, the training areas were also flown over several times with small drones in order to observe the training of the Ukrainian soldiers, the report goes on to say.
Security circles suspect that the Russian services could also have tried to spy on the Ukrainians’ mobile phone data with special devices.
The authorities also consider members of the opposition who fled from Russia to Germany to be potentially at risk. They could be targeted by the Russian secret services, the magazine said, citing security circles.
A suspected top Russian spy has now been exposed. She may have spied on NATO and US Navy employees for years, as joint research by “Spiegel”, the investigative platform Bellingcat, “The Insider” and the Italian daily newspaper “La Repubblica” revealed.
The woman is said to have been employed in Naples under the alias “Maria Adela K.” to recruit employees of the NATO and US military bases there as sources.
According to the “Spiegel” report, the woman’s Russian passport should come from a series of numbers from which the camouflage papers for the assassin of the Russian ex-agent Sergei Skripal should also come.
The member of parliament for the Greens and chairman of the parliamentary control committee in the Bundestag, Konstantin von Notz, sees considerable deficits in German counter-espionage. “After reunification, Germany largely stopped its counterintelligence activities, while other countries simply carried on as they did in the Cold War,” von Notz told Der Spiegel. “We were inattentive and didn’t pay attention to the details. And now we have a tremendous security problem.”
Foreign intelligence experts also assess the situation in a similar way. Germany overslept the problem, the deficits are difficult to catch up, said the former employee of the US secret service CIA, John Sipher.
Marc Polymeropoulos, former head of CIA operations in Europe and Eurasia, criticized the naivety with which some European states have looked at Russia. “From electoral interference campaigns to execution missions – Russia treats Europe like its playground,” Polymeropoulos told Der Spiegel. In Germany, warnings about this always fell on deaf ears.
