Moscow’s campaigns, which are working hard to destabilise Berlin

Berlin. Striking at Germany to weaken Ukraine. But also striking at Germany to weaken Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who is under siege from pro-Russian parties on both the right and the left. Once again, a media offensive is being launched from Moscow to further undermine the German head of government, who is already anxiously awaiting the counting of the votes on 6 September. On that day, voters in Saxony-Anhalt – the eastern federal state with Magdeburg as its capital – will go to the polls: an election that is small in terms of numbers, with 1.78 million eligible voters, but politically significant enough to make one’s hands tremble. According to the latest Insa poll for Bild, the sovereigntist AfD is expected to secure 42 per cent of the vote, almost double the 22 per cent attributed to the Chancellor’s CDU. In third place, with 13 per cent, is Die Linke, the social-communist party whose new leader, the Calabrian-German Luigi Pantisano, has offered an olive branch to the CDU to form a united front against the far right in Magdeburg. In Berlin, however, Die Linke opposes military support for Ukraine. The icing on the electoral cake, again according to Insa, is the expected entry into the regional assembly of deputies from the BSW, a party that split off from Die Linke but with nationalist, if not xenophobic, leanings and an anti-Atlanticist, pro-Russian stance. In a nutshell: 42 per cent for the AfD, a party hostile to Kyiv; 5 per cent for the red-brown BSW; and 13 per cent for a partly pro-Russian Die Linke – all confirm that the Russian bear is the uninvited guest at the elections in Saxony-Anhalt. Meanwhile, a recent report by NewsGuard, a service that assesses the reliability of news, argues that weakening Berlin could strengthen Moscow.

The story itself is not new. It was January 2016 when the “Lisa case” broke out on social media among the Russian community in Germany: the story of a young Russian girl in Berlin who had apparently been abducted and raped by migrants. A hoax amplified by the Russian state media and then repeated by Moscow’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov himself, who claimed that the German authorities were covering up the case. This statement fuelled a number of public protests until the Berlin Polizei proved that Lisa had made the whole thing up to divert attention from her poor school results. Ten years ago, disinformation was taking its first steps.

Today, NewsGuard warns, the media war is far more sophisticated. And there is a Russian influence campaign exploiting the upcoming elections in Germany: on 20 September, regional parliaments in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – the region from which the Nord Stream gas pipelines originated – will also be up for election. The aim of the campaign is to fuel a new division in Germany between east and west, thereby weakening one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies. The operation has a name that is not particularly original but easy to remember – Matrioska – and over the last two months has circulated 20 videos and numerous press articles attributing to German news outlets, celebrities, business leaders and other public figures alleged calls for the division of Germany into two distinct entities. A social media campaign using the hashtag #TimeToDivideGermany, featuring TV stars. “It is with great pleasure that I am joining the #TimeToDivideGermany campaign. East and West Germany only have a future if they are divided,” declares, among others, the American actor James Marsters – famous for playing Spike in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” – on social media. Real images, voices generated by AI. Other ‘messages’ are circulating in the media, complete with forged logos from Bild or the public broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

It is claimed, for example, that children in East Germany are more likely to fall victim to paedophiles arriving from the West; that Wessis (West Germans) are more willing to let properties to foreigners than to Ossis (East Germans); that 82 per cent of Germans under 30 are in favour of a new division of the Federal Republic; and that Julia Klöckner, the President of the Bundestag, is said to have described the Ossis as ‘mentally deficient’. These are rambling and often implausible claims, but those who assemble and dismantle these matryoshka dolls full of hoaxes rely on volume and widespread distribution. By the end of July 2026, NewsGuard had identified 723 articles of this kind, published across no fewer than 134 fake news outlets modelled in the image and likeness of the real ones.