Germany expelled two Russian diplomats on Wednesday after a Berlin court sentenced a Russian man to life in prison for shooting dead a Georgian of Chechen ethnicity in a Berlin park in 2019 on orders from Moscow, escalating a growing diplomatic rift
Judges in Berlin sentenced Russian Vadim Krasikov, alias Vadim Sokolov, to life in jail after finding him guilty of gunning down Georgian national Tornike Kavtarashvili, 40, in the Tiergarten, Berlin's most popular park, in broad daylight on August 23, 2019.
"Russian state authorities ordered the accused to liquidate the victim," presiding judge Olaf Arnoldi said, agreeing with prosecutors that the murder had been carefully planned.
The killing was in retaliation for Kavtarashvili's role fighting alongside Chechen separatists fighting Moscow in the 2000s, the court found.
"In June 2019 at the latest, state organs of the government of the Russian Federation took the decision to liquidate Tornike Khangoshvili in Berlin," Arnoldi said, adding that Russia had issued Krasikov with false papers with which to travel for the killing.
"Khangashvili had given up the fight against the Russian Federation years before. He had not held a weapon in his hands since 2008," Arnoldi said. "This was not an act of self-defence by Russia. This was and is nothing other than state terrorism."
Hours after the ruling, Germany's new Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said she had summoned Moscow's ambassador to inform him that Germany was expelling two Russian diplomats in response to the court's ruling.
"This murder by order of the state as determined by the court today constitutes a serious violation of German law and sovereignty," Baerbock told reporters.
The ruling is the first major stress test for Germany's new government, which has vowed a tougher stance towards Russia, and comes amid growing alarm in the West about Russian troop movements on the border with Ukraine.
Moscow immediately slammed what it called a "political" ruling against a backdrop of "general anti-Russian sentiment".
"We consider this verdict to be a biased, politically-motivated decision that seriously aggravates already difficult Russian-German relations," Russia's ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechayev, said in a statement.
Responding to Germany's expelling the two diplomats, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova described the move as "unfriendly" and said Moscow would retaliate soon.
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