Federal government attributes drone attack on Leipzig/Halle airport to Russia

One thing was certain for the federal government this week: the drone attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4th was an attack by Russia. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt confirmed the attribution on Tuesday, and among the notable details of the announcement is that there was no row in the coalition. Although the responsible ministers both come from the Union, there was no relevant cross-talk from the SPD. “It was right to attribute the attack clearly and quickly to Russia,” said Siemtje Möller, the leading foreign policy expert for the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, to the F.A.S. “The cooperation between the Union and the SPD was good.”

The fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately claimed that the federal government's "evidence" was "falsified" did not upset the coalition, nor did the supportive response that Putin received from people such as the deputy AfD parliamentary group leader Markus Frohnmaier and the BSW's top candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Claudia Wittig.

In Berlin people were prepared for such objections. Jürgen Hardt, the foreign policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, told the F.A.S. that if the accused side, i.e. Russia, does not cooperate, it would be “not possible and not necessary to present a chain of evidence that is secure according to German court standards.” In Moscow you “cannot conduct a house search and interview no witnesses.” Therefore, a “conclusive chain of facts that does not allow reasonable doubt” is sufficient. With explosives, for example, you can often tell where they were manufactured because there are always characteristic contaminations with certain chemicals. “If such substances contain water, for example, you can tell from the mineral content where it comes from.”

In this context, the Cologne international lawyer Claus Kreß refers to a resolution of the EU Council from June 2022. It states that when “attributing” a hybrid attack, information “from all sources” can be used. This also includes intelligence services, whose information cannot be revealed because it could endanger the informants. Conclusion of the EU Council: There is no “legal obligation to disclose evidence”. Kress adds that “evidence” cannot be required because “direct evidence – for example through a confession – is only rarely possible.” “Indirect evidence based on circumstantial evidence” is sufficient.

However, the evidence must be conclusive, and that was one of the reasons why the federal government needed almost a month to “attribute”. The fact that it was the last Tuesday, not earlier and not later, is thanks to an interplay of accelerating and braking factors.

The most important reason for the government to accelerate was the signal effect to the outside world. It was known that Russia was watching closely as Germany would mount an attack that, had it not failed, would have reduced parts of Leipzig/Halle Airport to a blazing hell. And it was also known that Moscow would interpret hesitation for too long as weakness - and as an invitation to take the next action.

The investigators were among the forces that put the brakes on it. Criminalists need silence to follow clues and time to perhaps find another hiding place with crime instruments or to set traps. Their interest in slowness is also shared by some diplomats - those who have to ensure that everyone among the allies in the EU and NATO follows along on the day of the public accusation.

The right tone also had to be considered, the balance between determination and moderation. “In its reaction, Germany could not give the impression that it was itself part of an escalation,” says Siemtje Möller from the SPD. “An aggressive appearance would have given Russian propaganda and the AfD the opportunity to further promote the narrative of an attacking Germany and an allegedly threatened Russia.” It was important to formulate the response to the attack in such a way “that the false impression is not created that our support for Ukraine endangers our security.” And here too, Möller is full of praise: Dobrindt and Wadephul “hit exactly the right tone”.

This is not a given, because it wasn't easy to find a balance that was accepted by everyone in the coalition. Shortly before the official apportionment of blame, Friedrich Merz had frightened some Social Democrats when he said that Germany would “deter” and impose “a price” on hybrid attackers. In particular, the sentence “they will pay for it” sounded so warlike to some in the SPD that they feared that in the coming state elections in the East, crowds of voters would flee out of sheer fear of war into the arms of the “peace parties” AfD and BSW.

But it wasn't just the sound that was difficult to find. The content of the measures against Russia also had to be calibrated. There was a particularly tough fight over one sentence, which Wadephul finally said. The sentence reads: “We are increasing the pressure on the Russian shadow fleet.” It concerns the sanctions against Russia's oil exports and is therefore the one that is likely to hurt Moscow the most among the penalties announced.

Until the 2022 invasion, taxes on oil and gas exports accounted for 44 percent of Russian government revenue. In the case of oil, the most important source, the flow of money then partially stopped when Western states decided to impose a price cap on Russian exports below market levels. Tankers that shipped Russian oil at higher prices have since been sanctioned. They can no longer insure themselves with the leading insurance companies and are no longer allowed to travel to the ports of the sanctions coalition. As a result of these measures, Russia has suffered losses of 176 billion euros since 2022, according to an estimate by the Kyiv School of Economics.

Nevertheless, oil revenues are still high. In July alone they were 11.9 billion euros, and that is also because Russia now uses hundreds of “shadow tankers”. These are often ships that are actually subject to sanctions, but are given new “identities” through renaming or changing the flag state, or are traveling with insufficient or forged insurance documents. The most common flag states include Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Sierra Leone, and because their safety standards have a reputation for laxity, the ships registered there are considered technically unsafe.

Berlin now wants to put this fleet under “pressure”. The tricky thing is that for hardly any other country is this as risky as for Germany. Along with Denmark and Sweden, it is one of the countries that control the entrances to the Baltic Sea - and the vast majority of Russian oil has to pass through these straits when it goes out from the large terminals around Saint Petersburg to the world market. 48 percent of all Russian oil products are exported from there, almost as much as through all the ports on the Black Sea, the Pacific and the Arctic Ocean combined. According to a calculation by the Science and Politics Foundation, around 1,000 tankers are used for this purpose every year - and according to a calculation by the American Brookings Institution, 60 percent of them belong to the “shadow fleet”.

This means that the most important trade route for the Russian war economy runs directly off the German coast through the Fehmarnbelt. Everyone in the Berlin coalition knows that the announced “pressure” on this artery will generate enormous and perhaps violent counter-pressure, and that is why Wadephul made it clear on Tuesday that the federal government has coordinated with its partners in NATO and the EU. He literally said: “She has their support and supports them in turn.”

Support can mean many things: more tankers on the joint sanctions lists, a more drastic price cap and finally control of suspicious tankers by ships and helicopters. After the foreign ministers' meeting in Ireland at the beginning of last week, there were expressions of solidarity, but in Berlin we hear that some are also hesitant. Tangible interests are at play. For example, among the world's ten largest shipping companies that transport Russian oil products, six are based in Greece, and there are reports that some EU states are circumventing the import ban on Russian oil by making indirect purchases in Turkey.

But there are also concerns in Germany itself. The F.A.S. learned from three sources that in the month between the attack and the attribution in Berlin, the question was also raised as to whether Germany would be able to take truly robust action against the Russian tankers even if the ships were accompanied by Russian frigates. Precedents in other countries do not provide clear guidance. On the one hand, there is the example of Sweden. The country is taking robust action, with the result that Russian ships are avoiding Swedish waters and preferring to sail through the Danish-German part of the straits. On the other hand, there are incidents like the one in May 2025, when the Estonian Navy wanted to inspect the tanker Jaguar. At that time, a Russian fighter jet appeared in close proximity and Estonia shied away.

Such scenarios have also been discussed in Berlin, and it is said that the Ministry of the Interior in particular has pushed for particularly careful consideration. What if the federal police under his command want to board a ship and then they “look into the muzzle of a Russian machine gun”? Continue? The Federal Police and the Interior Ministry have questions from the F.A.S. not answered, but it is said that there were concerns in these houses.

The CDU foreign politician Hardt says that the federal police are “prepared to board suspicious ships with their special unit GSG9 in individual cases and, if necessary, physically stop them.” The question, however, is “whether you want to do that if a Russian frigate is escorting the ship.” Nobody is under the illusion that “the shadow fleet can be completely stopped through physical boarding.” It will often be wiser to “deny the ships passage by other means”.

Ukrainian activists have been pointing to this “other path” for a long time. They are telling the EU: “Do what you do best: send bureaucrats after the Russians.” At Hardt it sounds like this: “We have to research even more intensively whether the insurance policies and registration of the ships are correct.” If, for example, an insurance policy comes by email from a ship, you have to check carefully whether it is in order, and sometimes it turns out that the ship in question is pretending to be a “false identity”. "To use fictitious names: In reality it is not the harmless 'Patagonia 2', but the sanctioned 'Patagonia 1', which has only been renamed. The insurance company must then be informed of this and terminate the insurance contract."

Another lever is protection against a possible oil spill in the Baltic Sea. Siemtje Möller says many tankers in the shadow fleet are old and dangerous for the coastal ecosystem. “This offers a good starting point for tightening controls.”

Another route leads via the states under whose flag the tankers are traveling. Examples show that some of these countries fear loss of reputation if they are associated with the Shadow Fleet. The Cook Islands, an island nation in the Pacific, announced that it would remove sanctioned ships from its register after a tanker flying its flag damaged submarine cables off Finland.

While politicians in Berlin consider these options, the war in Ukraine continues. Putin's army is stuck on the eastern front, and Berlin expects that Russia's hybrid attacks on the enemy's "hinterland" will therefore continue to increase. According to the analysis, Putin believes he can win if fear of war grows so strong in Germany and other Western countries that they no longer help Ukraine. In any case, the federal government believes they know one thing for sure: “We have to prepare for further escalating attacks.”