The German ambassador to Russia, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, held talks on bilateral issues at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on Monday.
“There was an invitation to discuss various bilateral issues,” Lambsdorff told dpa in Moscow. He emphasized that he was not summoned to the embassy, but he did not comment on the specific content of the conversation.
The Foreign Office in Berlin also made it clear that the ambassador had been at the ministry for an appointment that had been arranged a long time ago.
Lambsdorff thus contradicted the account given by the Russian media: Citing an anonymous source, the Russian state news agency TASS reported that the ambassador had been summoned because of the recently published recordings of a telephone conversation between German Air Force officers on the possible deployment of Taurus cruise missiles in Ukraine, which had been intercepted by Russia.
According to Lambsdorff, however, the appointment had already been planned before the intercepted conversation was published.
In response to a question as to whether the Russian ambassador to Germany should be summoned in light of this incident, a spokesman for the Foreign Office in Berlin said that he had nothing to announce in this regard.
Russian-German relations have been severely disrupted in the wake of Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
Nevertheless, there are regular talks between Russian representatives in the Moscow Foreign Ministry and diplomats from the various European states categorized as “unfriendly” in order to discuss issues relating to bilateral relations.
For example, following the mutual expulsion of representatives of the states, an important question between Germany and Russia is how the work of embassies and consulates should be organized.