The expulsion of 40 Russian agents who gathered intelligence in Germany under the guise of embassy officials is a massive use of a common diplomatic tool.

The German government last resorted to this method last December to express its annoyance towards Moscow.

At that time, the Berlin Higher Regional Court saw it as proven in a murder verdict that the perpetrator carried out an assassination attempt on his victim, a renegade opposition figure, in the middle of Berlin on behalf of the Russian state.

Johannes Leithauser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine has drawn greater attention to his secret services' activities in Western countries.

Usually they work formally disguised as diplomats in a so-called residence of their secret services in the respective states.

protects diplomatic status

State press agencies or the offices of airlines in the sending countries also offer the possibility of providing agents with a pseudo-identity and, more importantly, with a diplomatic status that protects them from criminal prosecution in the host country if they are discovered - which is why the only way to deal with exposures is de facto expulsion.

The German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is responsible for counter-espionage, does not provide any figures on the activities of foreign agents, but in its reports it repeatedly describes Russia, the People's Republic of China and Iran as the "main actors" in espionage directed against German state institutions and companies.

After American secret services reported that the United States alone had around 200 agents stationed in Germany during the course of the technical eavesdropping on German politicians, the federal government itself tried to get an overview by conducting a carefree survey of all the states represented by embassies in Germany asked how many agents were among their diplomats.

However, she then wrapped herself in a cloak of silence about the results of this survey.

Back then, the argument was the same as it is today with regard to the practiced mass expulsions: Considerable damage to the information collection of Germany's own foreign intelligence service - the BND - is to be expected.

According to the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" method of retaliation practiced in these cases, it must now be expected that an equal number of German "embassy employees" will be asked to leave Russia in the coming days.

The Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said on Tuesday quite frankly that as long as such an expulsion action does not become common EU policy, he would rather decide to keep his own “eyes and ears in Moscow”.

Foreign Office: Threat to Ukrainian refugees

Regardless of this, the expulsion of agents has now become an uncoordinated common instrument of the West.

Great Britain started with 37 expulsions, followed by the Netherlands and Belgium, France and Germany, and then Italy.

In German counterintelligence circles it was said that the well-known covert agents had been largely inactive since the beginning of the Ukraine war.

However, the Foreign Office now argued that the Russian probe was at least a threat to the Ukrainian refugees seeking protection in Germany.