Germany arrested a suspect named Ilnur N. last year and later charged him with espionage for allegedly passing information about the European Ariane space launch vehicle to Russian intelligence handlers.
The lawsuit, which involves information about the activities of Russian intelligence in Germany, coincided with one of the deepest crises in relations between Russia and the West in recent decades.
What is a spy?
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service first approached N. no later than the fall of 2019, and he agreed to cooperate. According to the prosecutor’s office, since the end of November 2019, the accused has regularly met with a high-ranking officer of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service stationed in Germany.
Prosecutors believe that he passed on information about research projects in the field of aerospace technologies, in particular about the various stages of development of the European launch vehicle Ariane, receiving 2.5 thousand euros for this information.
The suspect worked at the University of Augsburg, an aerospace research center. The city also hosts a significant part of the production of the new generation launch vehicle Ariane-6.
Transport missiles
ArianeGroup, owned by Airbus and France’s Safran, is one of the largest companies in the rapidly growing global space launch market. Competition in this sector is high: in addition to traditional rivals, such as Roskosmos, private sector companies are entering the market – Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The European Space Agency’s Ariane program, which has been in operation for 40 years, develops transport rockets designed to carry heavy payloads, including satellites, into space. The program is often referred to as a model for industrial and political cooperation between European countries.
Not the first story
Over the past years, Germany has several times accused Russia of espionage and cyberattacks. German counterintelligence officials claim that Russian intelligence services have been active in the country for a long time and actively.
In December, a German court ruled that Russian agents were behind the murder of Chechen dissident Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in broad daylight in a central Berlin park in 2019. When delivering a verdict on the case, the judge called it “state terrorism.”
Russia denied the accusations and called the court decision biased and politically motivated, but the German authorities declared two employees of the Russian embassy persona non grata and expelled from the country.
Another diplomat was reportedly expelled from the Russian consulate in Munich in connection with N.’s case.
In October 2021, a German who worked for a security company was given a two-year suspended sentence for handing over the floor plans of the parliament buildings to Russian intelligence services. In August last year, a former employee of the British embassy in Berlin was arrested on suspicion of handing over documents to Russian intelligence.
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