BND chief Jaeger tells parliament Germany risks a violent clash with Russia

Martin Jaeger, head of Germany's foreign intelligence service, told parliament on Monday that Germany is in danger of being pulled into a violent conflict with Russia, and that the threat of attacks inside the country is real and imminent.

Jaeger spoke at the annual public hearing of intelligence chiefs. He leads the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the BND. "The confrontation we are facing with Russia has taken on a new, more dangerous dimension," he said. He described Russia as waging a shadow war, and he named an attempted attack in Leipzig as one example.

He drew a line that matters for the rest of the warning. He said there was no indication of an imminent large-scale Russian attack on NATO territory. He then said Russia could engage in low-intensity military activities, particularly in the Baltic states. The two sentences are the difference between a general war warning and a warning about raids, sabotage and pressure below the threshold of an Article 5 case.

Jaeger said Germany should prepare for more meddling and intimidation, including threats of nuclear attack. "Moscow is betting on our weakness," he said. He tied the pressure to Germany's place as Ukraine's largest donor, and said Russia is determined to bring Ukraine to its knees this coming winter.

The hearing is the one day a year when the heads of the services speak in public to the parliamentary committee that oversees them. A line about violent conflict, given in that room, is meant to be heard outside it. Jaeger did not announce a new deployment or a change in alert status. He announced an assessment.

The Leipzig reference is the domestic half. An attempted attack on a target inside Germany, if it holds as he described it, is the sort of act that sits with the sabotage cases European services have logged since 2022: parcels, depots, rail, and sites tied to arms for Ukraine. Jaeger did not, in the public account of the hearing, name a suspect or a date for the Leipzig case. He used it as the example that makes the threat local.

The Baltic sentence is the military half. Low-intensity activity in Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania would test the line between a national police matter and a NATO matter. Jaeger said he did not see a large attack coming. He did not say the smaller acts were hypothetical.

Germany's support for Ukraine is the motive he assigned to Moscow. Chancellor Friedrich Merz was in Kyiv on Sunday with a fresh military package of about 1 billion euros and energy aid beside it. Jaeger's hearing came the next day. The sequence is public even if he did not cite the visit: a donor announces money in Kyiv, and the foreign intelligence chief tells the Bundestag that Moscow wants that donor to stop.

New powers for the service were part of the same briefing. German intelligence is set to receive authority aimed at stopping attacks before they land. Jaeger did not read the statute. The political point is that the government is pairing a public threat assessment with a request for tools.

What Monday does not settle is the weight of the Leipzig case, or how close any Baltic activity is. The sentence that will travel is the one he chose for the hearing: Germany is in danger of a violent conflict with Russia, and the threat inside Germany is real and imminent. The sentence he set beside it is the limit on that claim. He does not see a large NATO attack as imminent.