German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has again criticized Russia following cyberattacks on the governing Social Democratic Party (SPD) and German companies.
"We see that the Russian war is being waged at all levels," Baerbock said on Tuesday during her visit to the Pacific state of Fiji.
This included the blockade of Ukrainian grain exports, but also the cyberattacks that targeted not only Ukraine, but also the SPD and German companies.
"This is a process that is irresponsible. It is an event that we cannot remain silent about," Baerbock said.
Cyberattacks on the SPD and German companies in the fields of logistics, defence, aerospace, IT services have become public recently.
Germany has summoned the acting chargé d'affaires of the Russian embassy, Alexei Korlyakov, to Berlin for a week of consultations.
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office in Berlin spoke of a "standard procedure" on Monday. "The German government takes this event very seriously as behaviour against our liberal democracy and the institutions that support it."
In Australia on Friday, Baerbock said Berlin blames a unit of the Russian military intelligence service GRU for a 2023 cyberattack on the centre-left SPD, the dominant party in Germany's ruling coalition,. In June 2023, the SPD said that email accounts belonging to its executive had been the target of a cyberattack earlier that year.
According to the SPD this was made possible by a security vulnerability in software which was not known at the time of the attack.
