German authorities announced that a weapons cache and ammunition were discovered in the forest near Berlin last year, writes the BBC.
As reported by leading German media, the special services believe that this weapon was to be used for contract killings on the orders of Russia.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrind announced at a press conference that in October last year, domestic intelligence received information about a weapons cache on the outskirts of Berlin.
Special services officers, together with the police, established the location of the cache and found two pistols and a stock of ammunition in it.
According to Dobrind, the weapon was neutralized.
The secret services have been monitoring the cache for several months, but no one has appeared there.
"This case shows that we have to work in conditions of high threat", the minister said.
A source in the Romanian police told AFP that one of the two Ukrainian citizens arrested in Romania last October on charges of organizing attacks on behalf of Russia is suspected of being involved in the case of the secret weapons cache in Berlin.
At that time, the Romanian police said that two Ukrainians aged between 20 and 30 had arrived in Bucharest from Poland and "delivered two packages containing homemade devices to the office of an international courier company". "Their goal was to destroy this building by setting it on fire," the police press release said.
Romanian foreign intelligence said the Ukrainians were linked to "a broad sabotage network targeting European countries and controlled by Russian special services."
Romanian authorities claimed they had "prevented a new sabotage operation organized by the Russian Federation on Romanian territory."
As reported by the newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and the television channels NDR and WDR, citing sources in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution of Germany (BfV), wrote that the weapons cache belonged to Russian intelligence.
The head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Senan Selen, has long "warned in secret meetings in Berlin that Russian special services have intensified their tactics and are now planning contract killings in Germany."
The Russian Embassy in Germany did not respond to journalists' requests to comment on these allegations.
In 2024, CNN reported that Moscow had planned the assassination of the head of the largest German defense concern, "Rheinmetall" Armin Paperger. German politicians were shocked and demanded that the authorities take decisive action.
In 2021, a court in Germany sentenced Russian citizen and FSB special forces officer Vadim Krasikov to life in prison for the murder in a Berlin park of former Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili.