German Intelligence Agency Warns of Russian Disinformation Campaigns Targeting Elections

On 2 April 2025, Ger­many’s Office for the Pro­tec­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion (BfV) report­ed that Rus­sia has aggres­sive­ly expand­ed its dis­in­for­ma­tion and influ­ence oper­a­tions tar­get­ing Ger­man soci­ety and polit­i­cal process­es. The arti­cle begins:

Along with its war of aggres­sion, Rus­sia has aggres­sive­ly expand­ed the dis­sem­i­na­tion of (pro-)Russian and anti-West­ern nar­ra­tives and itself speaks of being engaged in an “infor­ma­tion war”. In this con­text, dis­in­for­ma­tion and pro­pa­gan­da are delib­er­ate­ly used to influ­ence pub­lic dis­course and polit­i­cal deci­sion-mak­ing in Ger­many and Europe and to delib­er­ate­ly deceive or influ­ence the pub­lic and pol­i­tics. The aim of these activ­i­ties is to cre­ate or deep­en uncer­tain­ties and lines of divi­sion in Ger­man soci­ety, to reduce the will­ing­ness to sup­port Ukraine, which has been attacked by Rus­sia in vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al law, and to influ­ence polit­i­cal deci­sions in this sense. Recur­ring top­ics include Rus­si­a’s (nuclear) esca­la­tion dom­i­nance, false claims about Ukraine, alleged “Rus­so­pho­bia” in Ger­many, issues of ener­gy, infla­tion and the econ­o­my, as well as defam­a­to­ry attacks on peo­ple in the polit­i­cal sphere, includ­ing in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the Bundestag…

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Key Points:

• Rus­sia employed a sys­tem­at­ic four-phase mod­el to influ­ence Ger­many’s Feb­ru­ary 2025 Bun­destag elec­tion through coor­di­nat­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion campaigns.
• The “Dop­pel­gänger” cam­paign used fake repli­cas of major Ger­man news out­lets like Spiegel and FAZ to spread false nar­ra­tives and tar­get emo­tion­al­ly charged topics.
• A new­er oper­a­tion called “Storm-1516” deployed AI-gen­er­at­ed con­tent and hired actors to cre­ate videos dis­trib­uted through fake news sites and pro-Russ­ian influencers.
• Russ­ian influ­ence oper­a­tions in Euro­pean elec­tions have esca­lat­ed to include cyber­at­tacks on elec­toral infra­struc­ture, as seen in Moldo­va and Roma­nia where elec­tion results were invalidated.

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