Russia Spreads Disinformation about Gas Shortage and Rising Energy Prices in Germany, German Intelligence Chief Says

Ger­man media is report­ing that Ger­many’s top intel­li­gence chief has said Rus­sia is delib­er­ate­ly spread­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion about gas short­ages and ris­ing ener­gy prices in Ger­many to “divide Ger­man soci­ety.” Accord­ing to a report by Handelsblatt:

August 17, 2022 In light of the mount­ing crises, the pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­al Office for the Pro­tec­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion, Thomas Halden­wang, has warned of their impact on inter­nal secu­ri­ty in Ger­many. His agency is observ­ing “that a rad­i­cal­ized minor­i­ty of right-wing extrem­ists, dele­git­imiz­ers, Reich cit­i­zens and con­spir­a­cy believ­ers are posi­tion­ing them­selves to occu­py issues such as the war in Ukraine, ris­ing prices, infla­tion and the coro­na pan­dem­ic and mis­use them for mobi­liza­tion,” Halden­wang said Wednes­day in Cologne. “To make mat­ters worse, Rus­sia is using tools such as cyber­at­tacks and dis­in­for­ma­tion as hybrid levers to divide soci­ety in Ger­many.” In par­tic­u­lar, Rus­sia is tar­get­ing issues relat­ed to Europe’s ener­gy sup­ply, he said. Accord­ing to the Cologne-based fed­er­al office, Russ­ian actors are try­ing to stir up fears of a pos­si­ble exis­tence-threat­en­ing ener­gy or food short­age in Ger­many with the “tar­get­ed dis­sem­i­na­tion of false infor­ma­tion” about gas short­ages and price increas­es, for exam­ple. [Trans­lat­ed with DeepL]

Read the rest here.

US media recent­ly report­ed that Ger­man base­load year-ahead pow­er prices, the Euro­pean bench­mark, are up almost 500% from a year ago and that the coun­try’s top reg­u­la­tor already warned that Ger­many must dra­mat­i­cal­ly pull back its gas usage to avoid a short­age this win­ter. A recent think tank report alleged that “decades of naivety, incom­pe­tence, and greed” led Ger­man pol­i­cy­mak­ers to pro­gres­sive­ly deep­en the coun­try’s depen­dence on Russ­ian nat­ur­al gas, which account­ed for 55 per­cent of its gas imports in ear­ly 2022.

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report has exten­sive­ly report­ed on Rus­si­a’s influ­ence oper­a­tions in Ger­many, not­ing that the Krem­lin’s influ­ence strat­e­gy is char­ac­ter­ized by the sys­tem­at­ic exploita­tion of exist­ing social and polit­i­cal cleav­ages and attempts to under­mine pub­lic con­fi­dence in demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions in Germany.