Germany has ordered around 150 Russian diplomatic staff and their family members out of the country by September 18, the Russian embassy in Berlin said on September 10.

The figure and the deadline come from the embassy's own Telegram channel rather than from the German foreign ministry, which had not published a number of its own at the time of writing. The embassy said those affected had been declared persona non grata, and the account was relayed by Ukrainian news agency UNN.

The trigger is an attempted sabotage at Leipzig/Halle airport in early August. A drone carrying explosives was found near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft used to move munitions, failed to detonate and was defused by police. Two more devices were found at or near the airport in the following days.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul announced on September 1 that a month-long investigation had concluded Russia was responsible. "Police investigations, patterns of the act, and intelligence findings demonstrate Russian responsibility for the attempted attack at Leipzig Airport," Dobrindt said, according to Defense News.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said the attack was planned in Russia over several months and that a major disaster was narrowly avoided. Moscow rejects the finding, and President Vladimir Putin has said the evidence was planted.

The measures announced on September 1 were the closure of Russia's consulate general in Bonn by September 18, the termination of the leases on the Russian House for Science and Culture in Berlin, and tighter visa and immigration screening of Russian citizens connected to hybrid operations. The expulsion of diplomatic staff reported nine days later is the next step rather than a new decision.

Moscow moved first on the retaliation. Russia's foreign ministry ordered Germany's consulate general in St Petersburg closed by September 18 and all branches of the Goethe-Institut shut, with staff told to leave, Al Jazeera reported. The ministry said Germany had provoked a new round of escalation and bore full responsibility for the consequences. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the German measures absolutely unacceptable.

The Russian embassy in Berlin has described the German case as "No evidence, no arguments, only the usual 'highly likely' reasoning and an unprecedentedly inadequate reaction."

Germany has expelled more than 80 Russian diplomats since February 2022, most of them, the foreign ministry says, agents working under diplomatic cover, and around 400 Russian nationals have been removed in total once deportations are counted, according to United24 Media. A round of 150 at once is an order of magnitude above anything in that sequence.

What makes Leipzig/Halle a target explains why Berlin has gone this far. The airport is one of Europe's largest air freight hubs and a working node in the Nato and Ukrainian airlift, which puts a drone found beside a munitions flight into the category of attacks on logistics rather than symbolic harassment. Germany has provided Ukraine with more than $50bn in civilian assistance and about $67bn in military aid since the 2022 invasion.

For the remaining commercial relationship the practical effect is on paperwork. Consular capacity on both sides is now cut to a single mission each in the other country, which lengthens visa processing for the businesspeople, engineers and family travellers who still move between them, and the closure of the Goethe-Institut network ends the last German institutional presence in Russian cities outside the embassy.