Germany news: Ukrainians on trial over Russia spying claims

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Bundesliga club FC Cologne have been fined €8,000 (roughly $9,250) by the German Football Association (DFB) for unsporstmanlike conduct after its stadium announcer loudly complained during a 2-1 home defeat against Borussia Dortmundon March 7. 

"Furthermore the club has been tasked with making clear to its stadium announcer in a suitable manner that unsportsmanlike comments, particularly regarding referees, their decisions and other match officials, should be avoided in future and stadium commentary should be delivered solely with neutral content," the DFB said in a statement, saying it had asked for written proof of compliance within the week. 

Stadium commentator Michael Trippel raised eyebrows during and after the game with a pair of comments about the match officiating in a close loss. 

When Cologne's Jahmai Simpson-Pusey was given a straight red card after VAR review, he said "ugh, disgusting." 

After the final whistle, Trippel complained once more about VAR decisions on the stadium PA, saying: "I will get in touble but I'll say it: in stoppage time there was a clear handball by Dortmund, and nobody's even reviewing that." 

The announcer had faced criticism from within the club immediately after the match, with sporting director Thomas Kessler saying "I did not like that" in a TV interview and pledging an internal discussion of the incident. 

The DFB said that this show of contrition from the club, as well as a written apology from Trippel, had a "softening" impact on the penalty imposed. 

Germany's Ministry of Defense announced that its year-on-year recruitment numbers at the end of February had risen by 20% over 2025, with some 16,000 young Germans asking to join the armed forces.

This trend is also reflected in the number of new recruits, with February seeing more than 5,300 incorporated into the Bundeswehr's ranks, a 14% annual increase.

The ministry said enlistment has risen significantly since passage of Germany's new miltary service law.

This requires males to register with authorities upon their eighteenth birthday. Females are welcome to register as well but are not required to do so.

Registration includes answering a questionnaire and undergoing a physical exam, though service remains entirely voluntary at the moment. 

There are currently around 13,400 volunteer service members in the Bundeswehr, a 15% annual jump.

The Ministry of Defense says the Bundeswehr has an active troop size of roughly 186,200 soldiers, 3,600 more than in February 2025.

Germany's Federal Cartel Office, or Kartellamt, is soon to receive expanded powers in its function as the nation's competition watchdog. 

With concerns on the rise that oil wholesalers are engaged in price gouging in the midst of ongoing wars in Ukraine and most acutely Iran, the government in Berlin has decided to act.

Prices at gas stations around the world have spiked since the start of the US-Israeli war with Iran and the retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz by the Islamic Republic.

Germany is no exception, still, "It is certainly notable that prices at gas stations [in Germany] have risen more sharply than the European average," said Economy Minister Katherine Reiche at a Tuesday press conference.

"The oil industry," Reiche continued, "has not provided any particularly convincing explanation for this. And that is why we will take action."

The Kartellamt will be given expanded powers, "to quickly investigate and stop price markups in the wholesale sector," according to the minister.

The move will also shift burden of proof from the government to oil companies when it comes to compliance and providing a basis for price policies.

A new law introducing a package of further measures to curb oil companies is slated for passage by early April.

The public transportation agency in Wiesbaden, a city in western Germany, is calling on the police to prosecute a 15-year-old boy who stole a bus and drove his girlfriend 130 kilometers to her school in Karlsruhe.

"Thankfully no one was hurt," said Jörg Martini, the head of the local bus company NVG, to the German news agency dpa. The bus was also found undamaged in Karlsruhe and driven back to Wiesbaden by someone with the proper license.

NVG still has no idea how the young man obtained the keys to the bus, and they rejected jests from the press that the teen clearly had a natural talent for driving. They stressed in a statement that a crime had been committed.

After meeting with Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola attended the Europe 2026 conference. Hosted by several major German media outlets, the conference focused on the future of European politics and its changing relationship to the US.

"We now have clarity, and I hope that we can bring some stability to our trade relations and offer businesses predictability," she said of the EU's trade deal with the US.

The European Parliamenthad paused putting it into effect after the US Supreme Court ruled that many of US President Donald Trump's tariffs were illegal. However, Trump responded by implementing new tariffs under a different set of presidential powers.

Germany's flagship airline Lufthansa has announced that it is canceling flights to Tel Aviv through at least April 9 and Riyadh through at least April 5.

As the US and Israel continue to strike Iran, and Tehran retaliates against US installations in the region, Lufthansa has decided to continuing suspending services that could put passengers at risk.

Air Canada, Air France, KLM, Delta, Aegean, as well as several Middle Eastern carriers have also announced route cancellations to continue into April.

Conservative Bavarian state leader Markus Söder has advised Germany's national soccer team to keep out of politics when they play at the World Cup this summer, which will be hosted by Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

"My advice - as little politics as possible. We tried that once in Qatar, but it didn't work out. Not a second time, please," Söder told outlet t-online.

At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, German players protested FIFA's restrictions on their free speech over Qatar's repression of the LGBT community by covering their mouths in a traditional pre-game photo.

His comments came shortly after Iran, which has been targeted by strikes from the US and Israel for two weeks, asked FIFA to move all of its World Cup games to Mexico.

Söder had already told the press that a boycott of the games "makes little sense" when the subject was first brought up in relation to the violent and at times deadly US immigration crackdown.

DFB President Bernd Neuendorf has also issued a statement saying a boycott is not being considered.

A contentious plan to fill in a vast disused coal mine belonging to energy giant RWE with water from the Rhine river, creating a lake, took another step towards realization on Tuesday. 

The first pipe to move water from the Rhine to the site was being laid in Elsdorf near the Hambach open-pit mine, as the first part of what will eventually be a 45-kilometer (roughly 28-mile) pipe to meet up with the river in Dormagen. 

Ultimately, the plan is to fill two RWE open-pit mines — the site at Hambach and the Garzweiler II site further north — to create large lakes around the huge craters.

The mines are provisionally scheduled to shut down in 2029 or 2030, after the expansion of their areas of operation in recent years in large part to compensate for switching off German nuclear power plants.

Environmentalists slam lake plans

However, the proposal is not without its critics. The BUND environmental NGO has questioned whether water from one of the busiest freshwater freight routes in Europe is clean enough for the task. 

"Here in this water, there are around 30,000 chemical compounds, including dangerous trace substances. In our estimation, they have no business being in open-pit mines converted into lakes, nor in the groundwater, nor wetlands dependent on the groundwater," BUND's Dirk Jansen told regional public broadcaster WDR this week. 

The proposal does not yet have all the necessary permits. RWE has permission to pump water from the Rhine, and to build the pipeline, but not yet to direct it into the Hambach pit. 

Activists also sought to block to the planning process late last year, specifically plans to fell more trees in a small forested area called the "Sündenwäldchen" (or "little forest of sins"), with police deployed multiple times to clear protesters from the trees. The activists accuse RWE of primarily planning what they refer to as a yachting harbor for the rich, and claim it should not be necessary to fell the trees to prepare the area for the creation of the lake. 

Germany backs its allies — yet questions are growing. As strikes escalate and prices rise, Friedrich Merz faces a legal, political, and economic tightrope. What's at stake for Germany?

Authorities raided properties in five states on Tuesday amid long-running investigations into a right-wing extremist group calling itself the "last wave of defense," or "Letzte Verteidigungswelle" in German. 

The federal prosecutor's office, based in the western city of Karlsruhe, said that a female suspect is thought to be one of the group's leading figures. 

The group is accused of both committing and planning potentially fatal attacks on left-wingers and refugees.

It first came to prominence last May amid coordinated nationwide raids and arrests, with most of the suspects adolescents or young adults aged between roughly 14 and 21. 

Prosecutors allege that the group was formed in April 2024 with the goal of bringing about "a breakdown of the democratic system through violent acts against supposed migrants and political opponents." Members are said to have considered themselves the "last line of defense of the 'German nation.'" 

There are no known cases of serious injuries or deaths caused by the group, but authorities say this is in part down to luck. Suspected crimes include attempted arson at a cultural center in Altdöbern in Brandenburg in October 2024, and shooting fireworks into a refugee accommodation block in Thuringia in 2025. At that site, the suspects also allegedly left behind neo-nazi symbols. 

Several of the accused are also alleged to have attacked or robbed people they claimed to consider "pedophiles," by posing as young women on online dating sites, arranging meetings and then attacking the people they lured in.

No further arrests took place on Tuesday, according to prosecutors. 

"Today's searches served to gather evidence on the existing points of suspicion," the prosecutor's office said. 

Operations took place in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein, including in larger cities like Rostock, Dresden and Lübeck. 

Several economic indicators were released on Tuesday, including surprise profits from Germany carmaker Audi and a study that shows plummeting investor confidence following the US and Israel-led war in Iran.

Despite Germany's key auto sector struggling for years amid increased competition from China, among other factors, Audi posted an unexpected 10% increase in profits in 2025 from the previous year.

Profit after tax increased to €4.6 billion ($5.29 billion) from the €4.18 billion in 2024. "We ended a challenging year with robust finances," CFO Jürgen Rittersberger said, but now the company had to seize every opportunity to build on this momentum.

Audi's profits would likely have been even greated with US tariffs, which cost the company €1.2 billion last year.

At the same time, however, a new survey by the Mannheim-based European Center for Economic Research (ZEW) found that investor confidence in Germany has sank significantly since the strikes on Iran began two weeks ago. Confidence fell by a staggering 58.8% in the past month alone, the study found.

A year after the Bundestag passed the hotly debated Special Fund for Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality (SVIK), two separate prestigious economic research institutes have found that the vast majority of the €24.3 billion ($28 billion) fund has been diverted away from its stated purpose.

According to the German Economic Institute (IW), 86% of the funds have not been spent on Germany's aging infrastruture or on meeting its climate goals. The Munich-based IFO institute puts the number closer to 95%.

IFO President Clemens Fuest said that the ruling coalition of Chancellor Merz's center-right CDU bloc and the center-left SPD have "used the debt-financed funds almost entirely for other purposes, namely to plug up budget holes" elsewhere.

Researchers found that only €1.3 billion was spent on infrastructure and sustainability efforts. "That is a major problem," Fuest said, as the package was meant to invest in Germany's economic future.

In fact, the IW said that this amount does not even represent additional investment, but is just enough to cover inflation changes.

Environmental, transport, school and hospital groups — branches that were meant to benefit from the fund — have been highly critical of the news. Friedrich von Schönfeld, the financial chief for hospitals run by Caritas charity, warned that without investment into better-insulated hospitals with more modern heating, upkeep costs will become untenable in the long run.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled in favor of a woman who was fired for leaving the Catholic Church.

The social worker was employed by the Catholic charity Caritas as a counselor for pregnant women. During a period of maternity leave that ended in 2019, she officially left the church for financial reasons — on top of the church taxes members pay in Germany, she had to pay extra because her high-earning husband was not a member.

She said she was fired upon her return from maternity leave for this reason.

The case was passed to the ECJ from the federal employment court in Erfurt.

According to the judges, a Catholic institution like Caritas is allowed to let employees go for publicly speaking negatively about the church, but not simply for leaving.

As to the question of whether religious-affiliated institutions can refuse to hire people based on membership, the ECJ said the decision was up to national courts.

A new ballet is premiering in Berlin this week after it was banned in Russia as "gay propaganda."

"Nureyev" is a portrayal of Rudolf Nureyev, born in the Soviet Union in 1938, and widely considered the greates male ballet dancer of the 20th century. He fled his homeland for France in 1961, and was a star of the Royal Ballet in London before becoming director of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1983. He died in France in 1993 due to complications from AIDS.

The story of his life first premiered in Moscow in 2017, but was soon canceled and then outright banned in 2023 for portraying same-sex relationships.

Now, both the ballet and its creator, Kirill Serebrennikov, have found refuge in the German capital, alongside many other Russian opposition figures.

The ballet stars former Bolshoi dancer David Soares in the title role. The 28-year-old Brazilian said the piece is "very special to my heart and a big responsibility" to take on.