(STUTTGART, GERMANY) – A German court has sentenced a Ukrainian man to 15 months in prison for espionage after finding him guilty of helping to plan arson attacks on behalf of Russian intelligence. Two other Ukrainian defendants were acquitted.
The three men, aged 22, 25 and 30, were arrested in May 2025 over an alleged sabotage plot targeting the transport network of a parcel delivery company. Prosecutors told the Stuttgart High Regional Court that acting on instructions from Russian intelligence, the suspects sent two packages fitted with GPS trackers to Ukraine in March 2025.
The trackers were used to map the parcel company’s transport routes ahead of a planned arson campaign. Prosecutors said the next step was to send parcels fitted with incendiary devices designed to ignite in transit in Germany or elsewhere en route to non-Russian controlled areas of Ukraine, causing maximum damage and undermining public confidence in security.
Sebastian Schaefer, director of the Institute for the Danube Region in Central Europe, told TVP World that he expects to see a rise in this form of hybrid warfare.
“I think this is part of this hybrid warfare that the Russian Federation is waging. We will see an increased usage of these means because in that case you can see that the people are recruited. They are not directly linked to the Russian state. It provides plausible deniability,” he said.
The case follows the discovery of an explosive laden drone near Ukrainian transport aircraft at Leipzig airport earlier in August 2026. It also echoes a 2024 incident in which a package linked to Russia caught fire at a DHL logistics hub in Leipzig.
Schaefer noted that Germany’s security challenge has fundamentally changed. “There are these hybrid threats that are allegedly coming from the Russian Federation. We can find certain proof for this as well. Therefore it was really necessary to not only reform the security services but also reform responsibilities of the security forces,” he said.
The report was compiled by TVP World correspondents in Berlin and Stuttgart.
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