A Kazakh citizen suspected of working for Russian intelligence has been detained in the German capital Berlin.
According to the German prosecutor’s office, 47-year-old Kazakh citizen Sergei K. For a year, he passed information about the German defence industry to Russian intelligence services, took photos of government buildings in Berlin and the official cars of European politicians.
“He also informed his contact in the (Russian) intelligence agency about appropriate targets for sabotage in Germany and offered to recruit additional personnel for a sabotage and espionage group,” the report said.
Investigators found many photos in the man’s phone and “were surprised by the enormity of his actions,” Deutsche Welle writes, citing German media. According to investigators, Sergei K. told his contact that he was “ready for anything.”
Last week, the criminal police department in Munich reported the detention of two foreigners-45-year-old Latvian citizen and 43-year-old citizen of Ukraine. They are suspected of planning sabotage for a foreign organisation.
According to a report by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) and the Globsec project, the Kremlin has organised at least 151 hybrid attacks in Europe during the four years of a full-scale war against Ukraine. The authors of the report counted 172 perpetrators, 95 per cent of whom had no previous formal ties to Russian security services. At the same time, only 58 per cent of them knew who they were actually coordinated by. At least 12 perpetrators were linked to far-right communities and 44 had previous criminal records.
The scale of such operations grew after the expulsion of more than 600 Russian agents from Europe since 2018, the report noted. After losing intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover, the Kremlin switched to recruiting civilian agents in Europe.