The 65-year-old reserve officer was found guilty by a court in Dusseldorf of passing documents and information to the Russian military secret service between 2014 and 2020
A German reserve officer was sentenced today in Dusseldorf to a suspended prison sentence of one year and nine months for spying for Russia.
The 65-year-old reserve officer of the German army (Bundeswehr) Ralf.G. (Ralph G.) a resident of the city of Erkrat, was found guilty by the Dusseldorf court of passing documents and information to the Russian military secret service between 2014 and 2020.
In his contacts with followers of the Russian embassy, ​​who belonged to the military secret service GRU, the reserve officer conveyed information about the German economy, in particular about the consequences of sanctions imposed in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea, as well as about the controversial pipeline natural gas Nord Stream 2.
“He also provided publications concerning the security and defense policy of the United States and its Western allies,” the court summarized in its ruling, noting that “contacts took place in part in person or by telephone, but mostly by e-mail.”
The defendant’s motive was, among other things, his pro-Russian stance and his desire to become attractive to the highest echelons of the Russian military and to enhance his reputation as a “security expert”, the court said.
The defendant, who pleaded guilty, was not financed, but “thanks to his contacts, he received invitations to events organized by the Russian embassy in Berlin and to the annual security conference in Moscow,” the court said in its decision.
The prosecution requested that Ralph G. be convicted. to two years of suspended imprisonment and to be fined 25,000 euros. His lawyer insisted that his client should be acquitted, claiming that the information he was passing on was not secret and was in open sources. The questioning on her part recalled that Ralph.G. passed on information from the so-called “White Paper” of the Ministry of Defense of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Russian military intelligence services before they even saw the light of day. He himself admitted that he was sending documents to the military attache of the Russian embassy.
In recent years, several espionage cases have disrupted Moscow-Berlin relations.
In late October, a German court sentenced a former cybersecurity company employee to a two-year suspended prison sentence for passing data about the German parliament to Russia.
In April, a court also sentenced a Russian scientist to a one-year suspended prison sentence for spying on the European Ariane space program on behalf of Moscow.
Even before the Russian attack on Ukraine, allegations of cyber espionage have pitted Germany and Russia against each other.
Specifically, Russia is accused of a large-scale hacker attack in 2015 on the computers of the German parliament and then-chancellor Angela Merkel’s office, as well as NATO and the French-language television channel TV5 Monde.
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