Основатель баварского стартапа, поставляющего Украине ударные дроны, рассказывает, что теперь спит рядом с ноутбуком, постоянно меняет местонахождение и уже написал завещание. Немецкие власти предупредили его в ла ...
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A Bavarian startup founder who supplies attack drones to Ukraine says he now sleeps beside his laptop, changes locations constantly, and has already written his will. German officials warned him in late 2025. Two alleged “disposable agents” were arrested in March. A lawmaker now says the plan involved a nerve agent. The case sits at the intersection of Ukraine’s drone war, Europe’s new defense industry, and a shadow conflict that has already reached German soil.
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| Source: Unplash |
Key Takeaways by Planet Today
Personal cost of the drone war: A 39-year-old German entrepreneur has lived under 24-hour protection for months after authorities said Russian intelligence targeted him.
Low-cost agents, high-stakes claims: Investigators describe the two arrested suspects as poorly trained “throwaway” recruits rather than career spies — a pattern German and NATO officials have linked to other hybrid operations.
Unproven leap from surveillance to Novichok: The federal prosecutor charged the pair with acting for a foreign intelligence service. Germany’s domestic intelligence service has classified the case as a suspected assassination plot. A Bundestag member says available information pointed to a nerve agent. Courts have not yet ruled on intent.
A repeating European pattern: The 2024 plot against Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger was later confirmed on the record by a senior NATO official. Donaustahl is one of several German startups that grew by supplying Ukraine.
What is still missing: Public, detailed Russian comment on this specific case; a completed trial; independent confirmation of the nerve-agent claim beyond the lawmaker’s statement.
The phone call that ended a private life
Shortly before Christmas 2025, Stefan Thumann received a call from German security authorities. The message, as he later described it, was that Russian military intelligence was planning to kill him.
“I was shocked,” he told RTL and Stern in an exclusive interview published on 18 August 2026. The meeting took place at a secret location under heavy security. Since the warning, he said, he has been living “de facto underground.”
“I’m fighting a duel with the Russian military intelligence service for my life. Constantly changing locations, 24-hour personal security, my private life has ceased to exist.”
Thumann, 39, is founder and chief of Donaustahl, a Bavarian company that makes reconnaissance and attack drones as well as military drone software. After the warning he drew up a will, filled out an organ-donor card and a living will — “things you normally don’t really have on your radar at my age.” He now sleeps next to his computer and starts work the moment he wakes, he said, so he does not dwell on his situation. The war in Ukraine, he added, has become “his very own personal war.”
In the same interview he went further: “I have become one of the greatest dangers for the Putin regime in Europe.”
That is his assessment. German authorities have not used the same language in public. What they have said is more cautious and more procedural.
Who Stefan Thumann is — and what Donaustahl actually makes
Thumann is not a career defense industrialist. German reporting has described a winding path: selling theological books, sporting-arms accessories and surplus Bundeswehr kit, planning solar parks, and a period on Hartz IV benefits. He founded Donaustahl in 2019. The company later shifted from civilian and surplus goods toward combat drones after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
By 2024 the German Economics Ministry had approved production and export of the company’s MAUS FPV platform. Early deliveries went to Ukraine’s Kraken unit, a formation under military intelligence. The drones are modular: reconnaissance or strike, depending on the payload. Later product lines include what the company calls a “Combat Stack” — avionics designed to reduce dependence on Chinese components — and a range of warheads.
Donaustahl is small compared with Rheinmetall. Company registry figures cited in German press showed rapid balance-sheet growth in 2023–2024. It belongs to a cluster of German defense-tech startups — Helsing, Quantum Systems, Tytan and others — that scaled by meeting Ukrainian demand for cheap, attritable drones and then selling the same lessons back to European governments.
Thumann has been unusually outspoken for the sector. On professional networks he has written that Russia “doesn’t want peace. It wants the destruction of the West.” That visibility is part of why security services treated him as a high-risk target once a foreign partner service flagged him in December 2025.
For broader context on how the Ukraine war has reshaped German industry and threat perceptions, see Planet Today’s Geopolitical and Ukraine coverage.
The surveillance: a bricklayer, a Romanian recruit, and two arrests
According to Die Zeit’s investigation published in early August 2026, the first visible move came in December 2025 in the Lower Bavarian municipality of Straßkirchen. A man later identified as Serhii N., a former bricklayer from Kharkiv with no intelligence training, filmed the entrance of Thumann’s private house and photographed the nameplate. Investigators say the focus was the man, not the factory.
Bavarian police detained him and copied data from his phones, then released him before the material could be fully analyzed. Later examination, Die Zeit reported, showed contact with Russian intelligence and attempts to locate Thumann through his father. By then Serhii N. had left Germany for Spain with his family.
Surveillance continued, investigators say, through Alla S., a Romanian citizen living in North Rhine-Westphalia. In March 2026 both were arrested in a coordinated operation — Serhii N. in Spain, Alla S. in Germany.
Germany’s federal prosecutor charged them with acting as agents of a foreign intelligence service. Their lawyers declined to comment. The BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, has classified the case as a suspected planned assassination. A federal investigating judge, however, was not convinced on that point; the arrest warrant, according to Die Zeit, cites only suspected intelligence-agent activity.
That distinction matters. Spying and preparing an assassination are not the same charge. The public record so far is stronger on surveillance than on a completed murder plan.
German and Western officials have repeatedly described a broader Russian method: recruiting “disposable” or “one-time” agents online from vulnerable or semi-criminal circles, paying them modest sums, and giving them limited training. The same pattern appeared in other European sabotage and espionage cases after 2022. NATO’s James Appathurai told the European Parliament in January 2025 that Russia used “criminal gangs or unwitting youth or migrants” for crude but purposeful acts.
The nerve-agent claim — and its limits
The most dramatic new detail in the 18 August RTL/Stern reporting came from Bundestag member Bastian Ernst. He said the plans targeting Thumann were well advanced and that “the information available to us shows clearly that it was supposed to happen with Novichok.”
Novichok is the family of Soviet-developed nerve agents used in the 2018 Salisbury attack on Sergei Skripal and later identified in the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. A few milligrams can be lethal; skin contact can be enough. Ernst added that “nobody else does that,” calling it a signature even if it cannot be proven in the same way a court would require.
This is a political and intelligence assessment, not a judicial finding. RTL presented it as such. No public forensic evidence, seized sample, or charging document naming a specific chemical has been released in the reporting available as of 19 August 2026.
Readers should separate three layers: (1) confirmed arrests and the foreign-agent charge; (2) the BfV’s classification of a suspected assassination plot; (3) the lawmaker’s statement about Novichok. Only the first is a completed legal act. The others are assertions by security officials and an elected representative.
The Rheinmetall precedent — and why it still shapes this story
In 2024, U.S. intelligence warned Germany of a Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest defense group and a major supplier of artillery ammunition and vehicles to Ukraine. German services increased his protection. CNN first reported the plot; a senior NATO official later confirmed it on the record in January 2025 as part of a wider campaign that included sabotage, arson and other attempts against industry leaders.
The Kremlin dismissed those reports as fabrications. Papperger’s company said it coordinated regularly with German authorities. The episode established a template: a high-profile German executive supporting Ukraine, a warning from a partner service, heightened protection, and a public debate about how far Moscow was willing to go on NATO territory.
Thumann’s case is smaller in industrial scale and less officially confirmed at the alliance level. The method described — cheap recruits, months of watching a house, possible later use of a specialist team or toxin — fits the same hybrid playbook that German officials now discuss almost weekly. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has been regularly briefed on the Donaustahl file, according to Die Zeit. The case has also appeared in the Tuesday intelligence situation meetings at the Chancellery.
In early August 2026, an explosive-laden drone was found at Leipzig/Halle airport near Ukrainian cargo aircraft. German officials called it a hybrid attack and a “new level of danger.” Russia’s embassy in Berlin called the episode a “hastily contrived provocation.” Those two statements — threat versus provocation — are the same argument now playing out around Thumann, only with a person instead of a runway.
What “living underground” means for a startup
Thumann has cancelled public appearances. He told interviewers he works immediately upon waking to avoid thinking about the personal cost. Donaustahl’s growth, like that of its peers, depends on trade fairs, ministry meetings and Ukrainian feedback loops. Removing the founder from public view is both a security measure and a business risk.
European defense startups have spent the last two years arguing that they can produce faster and cheaper than legacy primes. The same speed that made them useful in Ukraine also made their executives more exposed. A single founder who is also chief designer and public face is a concentrated target. Larger firms can rotate spokespeople and harden campuses. A twelve-person Bavarian shop cannot.
This is not unique to Germany. Industry voices have noted assassination attempts and bombings against drone executives on the Russian side as well. The war has made the people who design cheap flying munitions strategically valuable — and therefore, in some services’ eyes, legitimate targets.
Related reporting on shifting European threat assessments and the economics of rearmament appears in Planet Today’s Europe News and Economics sections.
The Russian position — and the problem of proof
As of the latest available reporting, Moscow has not issued a detailed, case-specific denial of the Thumann allegations comparable to its public rejection of the Papperger story. In other recent German incidents, Russian diplomats have used the word “provocation.” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in mid-August 2026 that Russia would adopt “much harsher methods to destroy everything that enables the West to fuel Kyiv’s war machine.”
That statement is political rhetoric, not a confession. It does, however, describe a policy of treating European defense suppliers as part of the battlefield. Western governments treat the same policy as evidence of hybrid war. Russian officials treat Western reporting as information warfare. Both sides have incentives to over-claim and under-prove.
The two arrested individuals have not been convicted. Their phones allegedly showed contacts with Russian intelligence; that is an investigative finding, not a verdict. The jump from “watched the house” to “was going to be killed with Novichok” rests on intelligence assessments that have not been laid out in open court.
A reader can accept that German services had reason to warn Thumann, that the surveillance was real, and that the risk was serious — and still note that the most severe chemical-weapon claim currently rests on one lawmaker’s summary of classified material.
What this episode actually changes
First, it shows how far down the industrial chain the threat has moved. Rheinmetall is a listed giant. Donaustahl is a startup whose early drones were built with wood frames. If the allegations are even partly accurate, Moscow’s target list now includes mid-tier founders, not only household-name CEOs.
Second, it illustrates the “disposable agent” model in practice: people with little tradecraft, recruited cheaply, used for reconnaissance, then discarded. That model is harder to deter with classic counter-intelligence because the recruits are replaceable and deniable.
Third, it raises a practical question for every European government now pouring money into drone production: how do you protect the people who run those companies without turning them into permanent wards of the state? 24-hour close protection is expensive. Changing locations every few days is unsustainable for a company that needs to ship hardware.
Fourth, it sits beside a run of other incidents — airport drones, sabotage of logistics, arson, and earlier plots — that German officials now describe as daily hybrid pressure. Whether each incident is Russian-directed, Russian-inspired, or opportunistically blamed on Russia is a matter for investigators. The cumulative political effect is already visible: more security around plants, more briefings in the Chancellery, and more executives who treat their own safety as part of the war.
What remains unknown
Was there a second team waiting to carry out an attack after the two recruits finished mapping the target? Die Zeit noted that the actual killers, if any, might have been recruited separately. Has any physical sample or delivery device linked to a nerve agent been recovered? Public reporting does not say. Will the two suspects stand trial on the assassination theory, or only on the intelligence-agent charge? That depends on prosecutors and judges.
Thumann’s own certainty is understandable. He was warned by his own government, then watched two people get arrested for watching him. Living that way for eight months changes how a person talks. Journalism still has to keep his words, the BfV classification, the prosecutor’s charge sheet, and the lawmaker’s Novichok remark in separate boxes.
The latest on-the-record account from Thumann himself is the RTL/Stern interview of 18 August 2026. The earlier investigative backbone is Die Zeit’s reporting of 5 August 2026. Together they describe a man who went from selling surplus kit to building combat drones, then from public founder to a person who no longer has a stable address.
Whether that is the successful disruption of a murder plot or the successful disruption of a surveillance operation that might have led to something worse is a question the German courts, not the headlines, will eventually have to answer.
Original source: Joint RTL / Stern interview published 18 August 2026; earlier investigation by Die Zeit, 5 August 2026. English-language round-up via AFP, 18 August 2026.
Disclaimer for fact-checkers: This article summarizes German official statements, court-related charging language, and interviews given by Stefan Thumann and Bundestag member Bastian Ernst. The two arrested individuals have been charged with acting for a foreign intelligence service; a suspected assassination plot is the classification used by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, not a completed conviction. The Novichok claim originates with a lawmaker citing information available to him, not with a published forensic report. Russia has not, in the sources reviewed, issued a detailed public reply specific to this case. Readers should treat intelligence assessments, political statements, and proven court facts as distinct categories.
