Ukrainian convicted of espionage in Germany gets prison as 2 others are acquitted

BERLIN (AP) — A Ukrainian national was convicted Tuesday in Germany on charges of espionage and sentenced to a year and three months in prison after being accused of sending packages containing GPS trackers to Ukraine via a Ukrainian postal service in March 2025.

Two other defendants, also Ukrainian citizens, were acquitted by the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court, German news agency dpa reported. The men, whose names were not given in line with German privacy laws, were arrested last year in Germany and Switzerland.

According to the indictment by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, they were allegedly part of a sabotage plot targeting the service’s transport routes, dpa reported.

The presiding judge said in the verdict the court believed the convicted man had arranged for a shipment of two packages containing GPS transmitters in Germany and must have known that they could have been used to spy on targets for acts of sabotage, dpa reported.

The defendant also must have realized that he had received the order through an intermediary from a Russian government agency, the judge said, according to dpa.

According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, a Russian intelligence service is alleged to have issued the order via intermediaries from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, dpa reported. The aim was to gather information on the parcel delivery service’s routes and transport procedures.

According to investigators, the next step for the defendants would have been to send packages containing incendiary devices that would ignite during transport, the indictment says. According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, such packages were intended “to ignite in Germany or elsewhere en route to parts of Ukraine not occupied by Russia and cause as much damage as possible in order to undermine the population’s sense of security,” dpa reported.

The three men had agreed to send the packages, the indictment alleged, but they were exposed while in the preparatory stages of the attacks. The court found no concrete plans for acts of sabotage.

The convicted man will not serve any time in prison because his sentence has already been served during pretrial detention.

In a previous case in 2024, Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England.