German authorities revealed this Friday that they are investigating Russian intelligence services as possible responsible parties for an arsenal found in Berlin. Firearms and ammunition were discovered a year ago hidden in a forest in the region of the German capital. A detainee in Romania last November revealed the location of the arsenal and opened the hypothesis of Russian involvement behind the transfer of the weapons, according to several German media outlets.
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The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (VfB) has assured these media that Russia is being investigated for the discovery. The VfB, the German intelligence services, point out that the armament was intended for violent actions on German territory. The weekly Der Spiegel added that the main hypothesis is that they were meant to attack Ukrainian interests in Germany.
This August, a drone loaded with explosives was discovered at Leipzig airport which, due to a malfunction, did not explode upon impacting a Ukrainian cargo plane. The main hypothesis of the general prosecutor’s office is that it could be a Russian operation.
The discovery of the arsenal in Berlin had not been made public until now because the police had kept the location under surveillance for months, waiting to be able to arrest more involved parties. Public television and the newspaper Süddetusche Zeitung state that the weapons had been modified so that they would not work and had GPS tracking locators installed. The VfB would have disclosed this information to alert of the risk and because those responsible for the weapons stash already knew it had been identified by the police.
A similar case occurred in November 2023 in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, when grenades and explosives were accidentally discovered hidden near NATO facilities. More than two years later there are no clues pointing to the possible perpetrators but the government confirmed in 2024 that both the material and its arrangement indicated that it was people with military or security experience.
Nordstream Sabotage
The revelation of the arsenal discovery comes two days after one of the suspects in the 2022 sabotage of the Russian-German Nordstream gas pipeline was arrested in Croatia. German justice will request the extradition of the Ukrainian Volodymyr Zhuravlov, accused of being one of the divers who placed explosives on the pipeline. Zhuravlov was already detained in Poland in 2025, but a judge rejected the extradition arguing that it was a military action in wartime and that the attack took place in international waters of the Baltic Sea.
This August, the trial against the first suspect, also Ukrainian Serhii Kuznetsov, is set to begin in Hamburg. This accused was indeed detained and extradited by Italy to Germany. One of the theses of the German prosecution is that the sabotage was carried out by a team of divers and retired military personnel with the approval of the Ukrainian military leadership.
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