BERLIN—Germany has expelled two Russian diplomats in retaliation for what Berlin said was Moscow’s refusal to cooperate in a high-profile murder investigation after prosecutors linked the Kremlin to the assassination of a Chechen rebel in Berlin.
The two diplomats attached to the Russian Embassy to Berlin were declared personae non gratae on Wednesday, meaning they would have to leave the country immediately. The two envoys were working for the Russian secret service, according to a senior German official.
The expulsions come at a time when several European nations are trying to rebalance their relationship with Russia, following a recent initiative by France’s President Emmanuel Macron. Germany is eager to preserve economic relations to Moscow, mainly to safeguard its energy supplies. They also follow a similar incident in Britain last year, when the U.S. and allied NATO governments blamed the attempted assassination of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal on the Russian military intelligence service, GRU. Western countries expelled some 100 Russian diplomats in response.
Germany’s government informed NATO and European Union allies of its action Wednesday.
Russia said it would retaliate to the expulsions. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Russian news agency Interfax on Wednesday that Russia would need a little time to work out retaliatory measures against Germany following the expulsion of its diplomats from Berlin. Leonid Slutsky, the head of the State Duma ’s committee on foreign affairs, compared the situation with the circumstances surrounding the Skripal case, where Russia said no real evidence was presented.
The expulsions, the most serious measure a government can take against foreign diplomats, came hours after Germany’s Federal Prosecutor declared that the murder of a former Chechen rebel commander in Berlin could have been orchestrated by government agencies of the Russian Federation.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said on the margins of a NATO summit in London on Wednesday that she had discussed the case with other leaders.
“We have not received any active help from Russia in the investigation of this case, and that is of course having an impact on the bilateral relations,” Ms. Merkel said in a news conference.
Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen fighter who held Georgian nationality, was gunned down in broad daylight in a Berlin park on August 23. Mr. Khangoshvili had sought, but been denied, asylum in Germany after he survived an earlier assassination attempt in Georgia.
The suspected assassin, who approached his victim on a bicycle and killed him with one shot to the head, was arrested shortly after. He carried a passport in the name of Vadim Sokolov, but investigators believe it was a fake identity.
The Kremlin has denied any Russian involvement in the murder and before news of the expulsions broke, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov described suspicions of Russia’s role as “completely groundless.”
Russian authorities have also refused to cooperate with the investigation, according to German prosecutors and the foreign ministry.
On Nov. 20, the Russian ambassador to Germany Sergei Nechayev was summoned to the foreign ministry and asked to provide information on the suspect, according to German officials.
Mr. Nechayev failed to assist the investigation, the officials said, and the Germany government decided to expel the two alleged secret service operatives attached to the Berlin embassy.
So far, the German government has avoided blaming Russia for the assassination and the case was initially investigated by the local prosecutor in Berlin as a normal crime, despite the U.S. government saying at the time that Russia was behind the killing. The Wall Street Journal reported in September that the U.S. government believed Russia was responsible for the assassination and that U.S. services had shared intelligence about the case with their German counterparts.
On Wednesday, Germany’s federal prosecutor took over the case because of its importance and for its possible link to the Russian government, according to prosecution officials. The prosecutor suspects that the killing was commissioned either by the Kremlin, or by the autonomous government of Chechnya, which is a republic within the Russian Federation.
Germany’s government hasn’t explicitly called for Western countries to expel Russian diplomats, as in the earlier Skripal case in Britain, according to one senior official, but it had provided its allies a full file on the matter and informed them of the background behind the decision to expel the two embassy workers.
Relations between the EU and Moscow have grown strained since 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and intervened to support pro-Kremlin separatists in eastern Ukraine. Russia’s alleged cyberattacks on European officials’ email addresses and European organizations, including antidoping bodies, have worsened the friction, as have accusations that Moscow interfered in Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum.
But more recently, some European officials have tried to draw Russian President Vladimir Putin closer and are considering over the conditions necessary to ease EU sanctions on Russia. The EU increasingly aims to engage with Russia on a series of global issues, ranging from Iran to China.
French President Emmanuel Macron is scheduled to host the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Germany at peace talks in Paris on Dec. 9.
German investigators believe the real name of the suspected assassin is Vadim Krasikov and that he could have links to the Russian secret services, according to one official familiar with the investigation.
Mr. Krasikov was wanted in Russia—also via an international Interpol warrant—for the 2013 murder of a Russian businessman, according to German officials. The murder, which was captured by security cameras and can be seen on the internet, shows that, as with the Berlin assassination, the killer used a bicycle to approach his victim and then flee the scene.
Mr. Krasikov couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
The federal prosecutor named the suspect only as Vadim K. and said in a statement that a forensic analysis of his photographs established that he was the same person as the suspect in the 2013 murder case.
However, Russian authorities shut down the investigation on July 7, 2015, German prosecutors said, withdrawing the Interpol warrant. Two months later, in September 2015, a passport in the name of Vadim Sokolov was issued. German prosecutors said that the holder of the passport was the suspect who was arrested for the murder in Berlin.
That the investigation was shut down and the suspect issued a new passport indicated that he could have been recruited by the Russian secret service, a German official said.
—Ann M. Simmons in Moscow contributed to this article
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com
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