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Additional background about this case and other cases in Europe:

The pace of arrests and exposures has been driven in part by increased cooperation among European services, officials said, as well as a post-Ukraine shift in mind-set in countries, including Germany, long criticized by some of their European neighbors as too complacent about the threat from Moscow.
“February of 2023 is not the same as February of 2021 or 2019,” said a senior Western intelligence official. After’s Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “there just isn’t as much tolerance or as much space” in Europe.

Senior officials described whack-a-mole-like efforts to keep Russian services from restocking European embassies with spies. In a speech last year, Ken McCallum, director of Britain’s MI5 domestic service, said the British government had “refused on national security grounds over 100 Russian diplomatic visa applications” since 2018, when Britain expelled 23 suspected Russian spies in retaliation for the poisoning of a defector in Salisbury, England.

As a result of such pressure, Western officials said they have also seen signs that Russia’s intelligence services are making decisions they would have avoided in the past — making operatives more vulnerable to detection. “Our work has revealed Russian agencies raising their risk tolerances,” said the senior FBI counterintelligence official, though he declined to provide specifics. In some cases, he said, “their actions to me show desperation.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/17/russia-spies-europe-arrests/