In early 2024, the German Foreign Office uncovered a gigantic pro-Russian online disinformation campaign. More than 50,000 fake user accounts shared millions of posts in a single month. On some days, up to 200,000 tweets generated a virtual tsunami of digital disinformation.
Germany has become Russia’s number one European target for information manipulation. The Russian offensive is poisoning German politics, softening the country’s support for Ukraine, and shaking transatlantic relations.
History plays an important role in explaining Moscow’s German obsession. Germany and Russia cooperated at the end and after the Cold War, forging dense economic and political ties. Future Russian President Vladimir Putin built a special relationship with Germany, from the launch of his career as a young KGB officer in Dresden through to his speech in the German Bundestag in 2001.
Russia takes advantage of several German “soft spots.”
Germany is home to a tradition of Russian-romanticism and self-professed “Russland-Versteher” (Russia-understanders). The 3.5 million Russian speakers in Germany present a vulnerable target. Germany’s postwar peace movement and “Ostpolitik” live on and undermine solidarity with Ukraine. At the same time, public trust is fading in the present “traffic light” Green-Liberal-Social Democrat coalition government and established media.
Together, these factors form a fertile breeding ground for Russian disinformation, which offers simple narratives of good and evil.
Russian motivations for targeting Germany are strategic. European decisions on important issues to the Kremlin — energy imports, defense policy, sanctions, Ukrainian accession to the EU and NATO — depend on Berlin. The country is currently Ukraine’s second-largest military supporter and the Kremlin believes it can find a useful lever to soften Western support for Ukraine.
As Executive Vice President and European Commissioner Věra Jourová pointed out in 2023, “They know that they will weaken the entire EU if they break Germany.”
Russian influence operations in Germany operate on diverse fronts. These include state-owned news agencies RT and Sputnik and so-called “alternative” media and civil society organizations such as the German-Russian Forum and the ‘Russian House’ in Berlin.
Increasingly, online social networks play the most important role. Thousands of tweets are artificially produced, often accompanied by images or short video clips, and then automatically flushed by tens of thousands of ‘amplifier accounts’ into the comment columns of real citizens. Automation allows coordinated posting of tweets in quick succession: at peak times, more than 2.5 tweets are sent per second. Retweets are often labeled with popular hashtags, such as #Oktoberfest, which contributes to mass dissemination.
Disinformation spreads fast. According to AI Forensics, a pro-Russian doppelganger campaign reached a staggering 38 million Germans between August 2023 and March 2024.
Russian information manipulation aims to divide and destabilize. The Kremlin wants to undermine democracy and social cohesion, discredit Western values, and weaken alliances such as the EU and NATO. Strategies include enticing, threatening, and confusing populations with contradictory messages.
The Kremlin targets contentious issues: migration, Covid-19, energy and climate, inflation, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Russia seeks to manipulate social debates foster mistrust in the media and portray the German government as incompetent and malicious. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia fueled anti-vaccine conspiracies and narratives around a “coronavirus dictatorship.”
The goal is to promote extremism on both sides of the political spectrum.
Moscow greeted the recent electoral success of the far-right AfD and the left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW — both extremist, pro-Kremlin parties — with a satisfied smile. Russian disinformation campaigns likely played a role in their electoral success: bot accounts promoted posts about the AfD and BSW before the votes. The Kremlin even produced a manifesto spelling out how to make the AfD great.
Both the AfD and BSW favor peace negotiations without additional military support for Kyiv. They want to resume energy imports from Russia and refuse the deployment of US-medium-range missiles in Germany.
Russia spreads false narratives about Ukraine. It accuses the German government of neglecting its own population to support Ukraine while questioning reports of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. It defames Ukrainian refugees.
These disinformation campaigns are successful. Since 2022, increasing numbers of Germans have approved pro-Russian propaganda narratives. More than half of East Germans support extremist parties. Trust in the Government and traditional media stands at a historical low.
Around the world, authoritarian states are working together to spread anti-Western narratives. Democracies are losing the information war. Germany has failed to take the threat seriously. Social media platforms have done too little. A response is required.
Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven is a German diplomat. He was deputy director of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service between 2007 and 2010. He served as NATO’s first Assistant Secretary-General for Intelligence and Security and Germany’s ambassador to Poland.
He is the author of ‘Putins Angriff auf Deutschland: Disinformation, Propaganda, Cyberattacken [Putin’s attack on Germany: disinformation, propaganda, cyberattacks’], published September 2024.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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