An individual from Ukraine received a conviction in Germany on charges of espionage. He was sentenced to one year and three months in prison. The court found he had sent packages containing GPS trackers to Ukraine via a Ukrainian postal service in March 2025. The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court acquitted two other Ukrainian citizens also involved, as reported by the German news agency dpa.
The men were detained last year in Germany and Switzerland. According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, they allegedly participated in a sabotage plan targeting postal routes, dpa stated. The presiding judge noted that the convicted individual had organized the shipment of two packages with GPS transmitters from Germany. The court believed he knew these could have been used for espionage related to potential sabotage acts, dpa reported.
The accused individual was informed, through an intermediary, that the orders came from a Russian government agency, as the judge stated, according to dpa. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office suspects that a Russian intelligence service issued the order through intermediaries from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The aim was to gather information on package delivery routes and procedures.
Investigators claimed that the next step for the accused would have been sending packages with devices that activated during transit. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office suggested that these packages were intended to ignite in Germany or elsewhere on their way to non-Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine to cause significant damage and undermine public security, dpa informed.
The three men had planned to send the packages, according to the accusation, but were exposed during the preparatory stages of the attacks. The court found no solid plans for sabotage acts. The convicted man will not serve additional prison time, as his sentence was already covered by pre-trial detention.
In an earlier case from 2024, Western security officials suspected Russian intelligence of planning to place incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes to North America. This included one incident where a package caught fire at a messaging center in Germany and another in a warehouse in England.