Russia orders the German consulate in St Petersburg closed by 18 September

Russia has withdrawn consent for Germany’s consulate general in St Petersburg. The Foreign Ministry said on Monday, 7 September, that the mission must stop work no later than 18 September and that every member of staff must leave the country by that date.

The same statement confirmed an earlier threat against the Goethe-Institut. The German cultural centres in Russia must close. Their staff have until 13 September to leave. Branches in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg are the ones that still had people on the ground.

Moscow presented both moves as payment for a German decision last week. Berlin said it would shut the Russian consulate in Bonn on 18 September and end the lease of the Russia House cultural centre in Berlin. Germany tied those steps to a drone found on 4 August beside a Ukrainian An-124 at Leipzig/Halle Airport. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said police work and intelligence pointed to Russian state involvement. The charge in the device failed. Russia called the accusation an invention.

The Russian ministry’s language on Monday put the blame in one direction. “It was the German authorities who, once again, provoked a new round of escalation in bilateral relations. The German government bears full and complete responsibility for the consequences.” The Auswärtiges Amt in Berlin called the Russian reply wrong. It did not reverse its own closures.

The diplomatic map between the two states has been shrinking for years. In 2023 Germany already barred Russia from running four of the five consulates general it then had on German soil. Each new cut removes a place where visas, cultural work and quiet contact used to happen. St Petersburg is not a small post. It sits in Russia’s second city and handles a volume of consular work that the embassy in Moscow cannot simply absorb.

The political temperature around the exchange rose over the weekend. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking on Russian television, said Germany “wants war again” and compared the Bonn closure to the run-up to the Second World War. President Vladimir Putin had already called the German measures a “serious mistake” and spoken of forged evidence. Those lines are for a domestic audience. They also tell European capitals how Moscow intends to treat the Leipzig file: as a pretext, not as a crime scene.

Goethe staff now have six days. Consular staff have eleven. Families, local employees and the German citizens who used the St Petersburg desk will feel the cut first. Cultural programmes that still ran in Russian cities will stop. The Russia House in Berlin will go dark on the German side of the same bargain.

None of this changes the facts of 4 August. A drone with hundreds of grams of explosive sat next to a Ukrainian cargo jet at a German airport. Germany says Russia sent it. Russia says that is absurd. The consulates are closing on a timetable while that disagreement stays open.

What follows is a thinner channel. Ambassadors will still sit in Moscow and Berlin. Almost everything else that used to live in Bonn, St Petersburg and the cultural houses will not. If either government wants to walk any of this back, it will have to do so after 18 September, when the buildings are empty.