Exclusive: Marrying Germany’s far right and far left is a Kremlin goal, according to a trove of Russian documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
BERLIN — When 13,000 demonstrators gathered at the Brandenburg Gate on Feb. 25 to call for an end to weapons supplies to Ukraine, the protest was led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a member of parliament for Germany’s far-left Die Linke party and a firebrand with national ambitions. Wagenknecht decried the prospect that German tanks, soon to be delivered to Ukraine, could once again be used to shoot at “Russian women and men.
The documents — details of which were broadly corroborated by officials in Western governments — show for the first time the Kremlin’s direct attempts to interfere in German politics by seeking to forge a new coalition among Wagenknecht, the far left and the AfD, as well as to support protests by extremists on the left and right against the German government.
“We know [these tactics] from the Cold War, when the Soviets tried to influence and manipulate the antiwar movements,” said a senior German security official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Wagenknecht said in a statement to The Post that there would not be “any cooperation or alliance” between her “and elements of the AfD in any form.” She said that any suggestion that she may have received communications from Russian officials or their representatives proposing an alliance with the AfD was “absurd,” adding that she had “not been in contact with anyone from the Russian state or any of its representatives.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied that the Kremlin was involved in any efforts to interfere in German politics. “This is 100 percent fake,” Peskov told The Post. “We never interfered before and now we really don’t have time for this.” Despite the Kremlin’s interest, Niemeyer said, Wagenknecht would never accept any support from Moscow. “That would immediately destroy this project because … you saw it with Marine Le Pen in France. She only borrowed some money from some Russian bank, and not even a donation, and that cost her the presidency. Sahra can’t make that mistake.”
The campaign even extended to graffiti to be painted on walls across Germany and then photographed and placed in the German press, the documents show. These included a drawing of a fat “Uncle Sam” saying, “Bear it a few more years.” Another depicted German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock sitting on the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline connecting Russia and Germany, waving a Ukrainian flag and saying, “I don’t care what the Germans think.” It is unclear whether any of this graffiti appeared.
“Normally, defending Ukraine would coincide with our own interests in the idea of national sovereignty. We believe in a Europe of fatherlands,” said Andreas Kalbitz, former chairman of the AfD in Brandenburg and a member of the party’s executive board until 2020, when he was ousted over his membership in a neo-Nazi group. “But this is a proxy war. And for many conservative people, Putin is the only big player working against the whole idea of Western liberalism.
AfD members and Niemeyer have continued to travel to Russia since the war began. When Niemeyer traveled to Vladivostok, a Russian city in the Far East, in September, he posted images on social media of his meetings at an economic forum with Peskov, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Alexei Miller, chief executive of Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant.
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