We don’t know what country he was spying for, but we do know it’s not Russia. From the very short article: > The case does not involve Russia, according to information obtained by Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

There's a certain subset of every population that just wants to be dominated. Some of these people don't have the courage to ask their romantic partner or a professional, so they try to realize their kink through political means.

Are you sympathetic to MBS when you buy oil from Saudi Arabia?

> Can someone please explain what's going on here?

Putin got'em addicted to cheap Russian gas and paid up anti nuclear NGOs who also got cash from big oil.

Also Berlin still has some Russian minority since the GDR. That includes anti Putin Russian diaspora or people that just needed a break from paranoia and brespredel.

Similar to why there's a significant fraction of pro-mainland China people in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Reasons include people who benefitted from the Soviet Union, often due to business and trade. Analogy would be Foxconn, a Taiwanese company which is dependent on manufacturing in China.

Nostalgia/rose-tinted glasses/rosy retrospection, Ostalgie in German.

Families that were ethnically from Russia, moved during the Soviet Union times and still have ties to Russia.

The former East Germany is way more pro-Russian than the former West Germany, showing the effects of these factors.

From what I see here it’s a mixture of anti-Americanism, „Ostslgie“ (the longing for the good old times of the DDR, a feeling often inherited from parents) and a crap ton of Russian propaganda that floods social media.

Combine this with a step economic decline and voila you got the perfect conditions for autocratic sympathies

Mossad/Israel at least:

> Documents supplied to the Hamburg court indicated that Hanning was the go-between with the Israelis. According to media reports, these Hamburg court documents contained clues to his other business activity with classified BND information.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/10/06/former-ge...

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and western intelligence precedent (eg russian “illegals program”) is that when it’s Russia/China, it’s named.

So the omission here itself (and denial of Russia) is some additional speculative information, on top of his already known ties to Mossad.

Spiegel says Azerbaijan.

He was a career bureaucrat who got position after position. BND was just one of them.

The list of German politicians and bureaucrats with scandals is long, ranging from Olaf Scholz to von der Leyen. So this isn't too surprising.

As a geopolitical nerd, I've consumed a lot of non-fiction espionage content. In general, there's a general theme that German intelligence is a joke at best. He must have gotten too greedy or very lazy/sloppy.