Phone taps, sabotage and an assassination plot: Is Germany in Cold War 2.0?

As a hot war rages between Russia and Ukraine, there are fears that Europe has slipped into a new Cold War.

“When we think of the Cold War, we have a tendency to think of the 1970s by which point the rules of the game had become established and accepted,” says Mark Galeotti, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) and director of Mayak Intelligence.

“In some way, we’re in the early Cold War – the Fifties and Sixties, so a much rawer time.”

But what does a rekindled Cold War look like for Europe’s biggest economy and a country that was once itself cut in half by the Iron Curtain?

The biggest bombshell dropped just last month when CNN reported that US officials had told Berlin of an alleged Russian plot to kill the chief executive of Germany’s biggest arms company Rheinmetall.

The Kremlin denied the report but German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who strikes a hawkish figure next to the more hesitant Chancellor Olaf Scholz, hit out at Russia for “waging a hybrid war of aggression”.

I met Rheinmetall’s CEO, Armin Papperger, at a ground-breaking ceremony for a new ammunition factory in February.