Berlin’s ‘Russian House’ stayed open despite Russia’s war in Ukraine and EU sanctions, shielded by a reciprocal deal over Moscow’s Goethe-Institut. Germany’s sabotage accusation was the final straw.

In early September, Germany’s Foreign Ministry announced the closure of the Russian House in Berlin, Russia’s largest cultural center abroad. The center had operated in the heart of the German capital for more than 40 years. It remained open after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, even as similar institutions across Europe shut down. What finally brought it to an end was a drone attack on Leipzig Airport that German authorities described as Russian sabotage. Meduza tells the center’s story.

In early August, a DHL cargo plane approaching Leipzig Airport had to climb sharply when the airport unexpectedly closed. After the plane landed in Hanover, inspectors found minor damage caused by a collision with an unidentified flying object.

At Leipzig Airport, bomb disposal experts found and defused a drone fitted with explosives and a detonator near a Ukrainian An-124 cargo plane. Ten days later, another drone bearing traces of explosives was found near the airport.

German authorities investigated for nearly a month before blaming Russia for the attempted sabotage. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul announced Germany’s response: the closure of Russia’s consulate in Bonn and the Russian House in Berlin. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova criticized the decision. Speaking about the Russian House, she said:

There are more than 70 Russian Houses worldwide. The full-scale war has disrupted their work.

The worldwide network of Russian Houses took its present form in 2008, when President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree creating Rossotrudnichestvo, a Russian federal agency for cultural outreach abroad. Officially overseen by the Foreign Ministry, the agency runs Russian language courses and promotes Russian culture, science, and education.

Before the war, Russian Houses operated in at least 77 countries. Their work became more difficult after the EU imposed sanctions on Rossotrudnichestvo following the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In July 2022, the EU added the agency to its sanctions list, accusing it of promoting the ideas of the “Russian World,” funding propaganda projects, and spreading “Kremlin narratives” and historical revisionism.

After the EU’s decision, Russian Houses suspended operations in six European countries: Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Romania. The Russian House in Baku also suspended operations in 2025 after a passenger plane crashed near Aktau. In July 2026, the Russian House in Chișinău closed indefinitely. Moldovan authorities called it a “tool of the Kremlin’s hybrid influence.”

In Berlin, however, the Russian House kept operating after the sanctions against Rossotrudnichestvo. Its seven-story modernist building on Friedrichstraße, within walking distance of the Russian embassy, opened in 1984 as the House of Soviet Culture and Science. It was the Soviet Union’s largest cultural center abroad. Russia later took ownership of the building, and the center became the Russian House of Culture and Science.

The Russian House’s activities changed little over more than 40 years. At its 20th anniversary celebration in 2004, then-director Anatoly Bogushevsky said the center drew about 300,000 visitors a year. Its main aim, he said, was to give people in Germany “as comprehensive a picture as possible of a new, reformed Russia seeking to strengthen democracy.” Its activities centered on a Russian language center, a Russian college, a Pushkin Library with more than 40,000 books, small clubs and workshops, concerts, and film screenings.

Decades later, the 29,000-square-meter building, which occupies an entire Berlin block, still housed children’s clubs and workshops — some free, others paid — as well as a movie theater, concert halls, and exhibition spaces. Rossotrudnichestvo says more than three million people attended events there over the past 15 years. Some events, however, were difficult to describe as purely cultural. After 2022, the theater sometimes screened RT material that called Ukrainians Nazis, and the center held photo exhibitions on similar themes.

Two agreements signed in 2011 and 2013 governed the Russian House’s operations. The first established its status as a cultural and information center; the second gave Russia the right to lease the building for 99 years. Throughout that period, Germany paid about 70,000 euros a year in property tax on the land beneath it. In return, Germany received the right to lease the Goethe-Institut building on Baumanskaya Street in Moscow on the same terms.

Berlin long resisted politicians’ calls to close the Russian House because terminating those agreements could put the Goethe-Institut in Russia at risk.

Even so, sanctions severely hampered the Russian House’s work. All its assets in the EU were frozen, and it could use its bank account only under Bundesbank supervision. Its ability to receive money was tightly restricted: EU legal entities were barred from providing it with funds or economic resources, directly or indirectly, while it could accept only enough from third parties to maintain the building.

The Russian House nevertheless continued collecting rent on apartments and offices in the building. Tagesschau.de found that 115 people lived there in June 2023. In 2018, for example, the Russian House earned about $2 million from rent. Meduza asked Rossotrudnichestvo what would happen to the apartment residents after the closure but had received no response by publication.

The Russian House has drawn espionage allegations

Once the invasion of Ukraine began, German authorities increasingly suspected that the building could be used for spying and to skirt sanctions. In January 2023, Berlin prosecutors launched a probe into possible violations of the country’s foreign trade law. It led nowhere. Prosecutors closed the investigation after Germany froze the Russian House’s accounts, and Moscow hit back by freezing the Goethe-Institut’s accounts there.

The allegations gained renewed attention in the summer of 2026, when German outlets Süddeutsche Zeitung and WDR reported on a French Interior Ministry document. According to the document, Russian intelligence services use the Russian House as a front, and the center’s mission is to influence the diaspora to support Moscow’s policies.

Green Party Bundestag member Robin Wagener called the allegations plausible, saying, “The center’s activities are not limited to harmless language courses.” Christian Democratic Union lawmaker Roderich Kiesewetter called it a “disinformation center” and an extension of the Kremlin. An investigation by CORRECTIV also found that the organization running the Russian House maintains a branch in Dresden called the German-Russian Cultural Institute.

In August 2026, Green Party Bundestag member Sara Nanni, who works on defense issues, pointed to unusual mobile phone and GPS “signal activity” near the building. She said it could indicate that powerful equipment for intercepting signals or communicating covertly was operating inside. Kiesewetter also said that although 100 people lived in the complex, the building used a disproportionate amount of electricity. He and Free Democratic Party member of the European Parliament Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann said the building might serve as a hub for technical intelligence gathering and the coordination of cyberattacks.

Many of the building’s business tenants, however, had no connection to Rossotrudnichestvo. They included the Samowar Hof restaurant and Mnogo Knig, one of Berlin’s few Russian-language bookstores. Businesses there may also have faced pressure from Russian authorities. Journalist Ilya Barabanov said that in 2024, a complaint from Rossotrudnichestvo led the bookstore to remove his book “Nash biznes — smert” (“Our Business Is Death”), about the Wagner private military company, from sale. Meduza published the book.

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The closure led to deportations and cost dozens of people their jobs

Staff assigned from Russia to the Russian House and Rossotrudnichestvo were ordered to leave Germany within seven days. On September 10, they arrived in Belarus along with diplomats from the closed consulate in Bonn. According to Ekho, only about seven Russian House employees were specialists assigned from Russia; they were the ones who had to leave Germany. The rest had been hired locally, and some were German citizens.

Sabine Gimaeva, who owns the Samowar Hof café that opened in the Russian House more than a decade ago, told Meduza that many cultural and educational projects stopped almost immediately after Germany’s Foreign Ministry announced the closure. Commercial tenants were given until December to leave. Gimaeva said the closure would affect more than Russians:

In Gimaeva’s view, the German authorities’ decision hurts “ordinary workers and private businesses” rather than Russian state institutions. Businesses may struggle to relocate on short notice, she said, and some may close, costing people their jobs:

The Russian House closed just before the September 20 election to Berlin’s state parliament, and the decision quickly became a campaign issue. Even before the closure was announced, Social Democratic mayoral candidate Steffen Krach stood outside the building with a sign reading, “Here’s something we can expropriate, friends in the Left Party! Are you with us?” He did not clearly state his position on the Russian House’s status; his gesture appeared to invoke the Left Party’s plans to nationalize housing. Krach did not respond to Meduza’s request for comment.

On September 4, after the foreign minister’s official announcement, two protests took place outside the Russian House — one supporting the closure and one opposing it. Reforum Space Berlin, a space for antiwar Russians created by the Free Russia Foundation, helped organize the protest in favor. Its coordinator, Yulia Abdullaeva, who has lived in Berlin since 2011, told Meduza that alternatives to the Russian House already exist in the city:

Supporters of keeping the Russian House open held their own protest that day. One organizer was the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a party that advocates better relations with Russia. Alexander King, co-chair of its Berlin branch, told Meduza that closing the Russian House and the Bonn consulate amounted to “far-reaching measures that could bring us closer to a possible military conflict.” In the September 20 election, the party failed to clear the 5% threshold for seats in parliament.

Samowar Hof owner Sabine Gimaeva also attended the protest in support of the Russian House. “To me, that’s a perfectly normal way to stand up for what matters to me — if a decision directly affects my family, our business, the people who work here, and cultural projects that have been here for years, of course I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t concern me,” she said.

Die Welt estimated that several hundred people attended the protest against the closure. Deutsche Welle gave more precise figures: about 250 people attended the rally supporting the closure, and about 500 opposed it. Reforum Space Berlin coordinator Olga Galkina, however, told Ekho that the two sides were roughly equal in number. In her view, those who wanted to keep the center included ethnic German immigrants known as “late resettlers” and Putinverstehers, or Putin sympathizers. Abdullaeva made a similar distinction:

The Left Party, which won the Berlin election, had not publicly commented on the Russian House’s closure during the campaign. Earlier, however, the party’s deputy federal chair, Maximilian Schirmer, had called the center “a propaganda institution.”

The parties that finished second and third — the Christian Democratic Union and Alternative for Germany, respectively — differed in their positions. The Christian Democrats, Berlin’s current governing party, had consistently called for the Russian House to close. Alternative for Germany had not stated a position directly, though its Bundestag member Karsten Hilse attended the protest in support of the center.

As the Russian House closed, Rossotrudnichestvo announced plans to expand the network. On September 8, agency head Igor Chaika signed agreements to open 11 new Russian Houses in Kenya, the Republic of the Congo, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, São Tomé and Príncipe, Togo, Madagascar, Armenia, and Thailand. The agency’s deputy head also said a new Russian House in Germany “will definitely open” and that the search for new partners was already underway.