About eight months after her arrest, the federal prosecutor general has indicted Ilona W., a 57-year-old businesswoman from Berlin. According to information from SPIEGEL magazine, the 74-page indictment accuses the German-Ukrainian woman of “espionage activities” in favor of Russia. However, the initial suspicion of espionage in a “particularly serious case” does not seem to have been confirmed, the source cited writes.
On January 21, officials from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) arrested Ilona W. in Berlin. According to research by SPIEGEL magazine, at the same time, searches took place at the homes of two former employees of the Federal Ministry of Defense, with whom W. is said to have been in contact.
According to the survey, the entrepreneur in the field of public relations would have provided, starting from November 2023, sensitive information to a contact within the Russian Embassy in Berlin.
According to information from the German counterintelligence services, the man in question was an officer of the Russian military secret service GRU, disguised as a deputy attaché. The alleged diplomat, Andrej M., was forced to leave Germany at the beginning of the year.
More precisely, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office accuses Ilona W., among other things, of intentionally collecting information about participants at political meetings in Germany. According to investigations by SPIEGEL magazine, she would have gathered, for example, details about the “NATO-Talk” in November 2023, held at the luxury Adlon hotel in Berlin, as well as about the German-Ukrainian Economic Forum in December 2025, also in Berlin. At that time, Ilona W. was standing just a few meters behind the Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) and the Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski.
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