Russia’s losses in the war – a spy in German intelligence transmitted data to the FSB

Arthur E. was detained at Munich airport on December 22 upon arrival from the USA. The next day, he was arrested on suspicion of complicity in high treason as an alleged accomplice of Carsten L, who had previously been detained on suspicion of spying for Russia.

Artur E. claims that Carsten L. “organized” contacts in Moscow for him. Investigators, in turn, do not exclude that everything was the other way around: E. persuaded a BND employee to give him secret information from the German intelligence service and himself established the necessary contacts in Russia.

According to Der Spiegel, at the end of October last year, Arthur E. went to Russia for a secret meeting with information received from Karsten L. In one of the Moscow restaurants, he met with two FSB officers and handed them an envelope with several dozen pages of documents in Russian .

Before that, he got acquainted with the contents of the envelope and photographed some of the documents, including printed screenshots of tables with data on Russian military losses in Ukraine, which, as the publication suggests, the BND intercepted during a covert operation. According to the publication, these documents could help the Russian intelligence service to understand what sources of information German intelligence uses in Russia.

However, according to the publication, Arthur E. told the German investigators that the FSB officers were dissatisfied with the quality of the documents received – in their opinion, unreadable.

Therefore, in November, E. again went to Moscow with BND documents and this time received an envelope with money – presumably from the FSB. According to Arthur E., it was at this point that he had doubts about what exactly he was doing. Until his second trip, he allegedly thought he was operating as part of a covert German intelligence mission, and not as a supposed accomplice of a double agent. Investigators believe that E. is only trying to protect himself with this statement.

Worthy of special attention Der Spiegel calls another statement by Arthur E. during the interrogation. According to him, on his return from Moscow to Munich, he was met not by Carsten L., but by another BND employee, to whom he handed over the envelope. This officer led E. through a special exit from the arrivals hall, bypassing German customs. In this regard, another investigation has been launched, although, according to the publication, investigators tend to believe that this BND employee was not privy to what he was doing, and suspicions of his complicity in the crime may not be confirmed.

According to Der Spiegel, Arthur E. and Karsten L. met through a mutual friend in 2021 at a festivity in the southern Bavaria town of Weilheim, where a BND employee lives with his family. Artur E. was born in 1991 in a family of immigrants from Russia. In 1999, he lost his Russian citizenship and became a German citizen. From 2009 to 2015, E. served on a contract basis in the Bundeswehr.

Remember, in December arrested in Germany an employee of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), who is suspected of spying for Russia.

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