Berlin will demand EU sanctions against Russia for hacker attacks

The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs “invited for a talk” Russian Ambassador Sergiy Nechayev due to a hacker attack on the Bundestag in 2015.

A Foreign Ministry press release issued on Thursday, May 28th, said the ministry’s secretary of state, Miguel Berger, had strongly condemned the hacking attack on the German government, which investigators suspect is Russia.

In the opinion of the expert of the European Policy Centre Paul Ivan, “Germany will seek EU sanctions but there will need to be unanimity in the EU Council in order to adopt them; no decision for the moment”.

The Russian ambassador was informed that the German federal government would ask European structures to apply the EU sanctions regime against those responsible for the attack on the Bundestag, including Russian Dmytro Badin. An arrest warrant was issued on May 5 on suspicion that the accused, acting in conjunction with others, had carried out intelligence activities against Germany for a foreign intelligence service.

“The accused is considered a suspect in the hacker attack on the German Bundestag in April / May 2015 as a member of the APT28 group. There is reliable evidence that he was an employee of the GRU military secret service at the time of the attack,” the German Foreign Ministry said.

The ministry stressed that the federal government is also assessing the process in the wake of an investigation into the murder in Berlin last summer of former Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili.

Earlier in her speech in the Bundestag, Angela Merkel called cyberattack in 2015 terrible and blamed Russian hackers. Moscow denies the allegations.