BERLIN (dpa-AFX) – According to the observations of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Russia has been running intensified disinformation campaigns in Germany since the attack on Ukraine. Moscow’s approach in the information space has changed significantly over the past year and a half, said counterintelligence specialist at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Bodo Becker, on Tuesday in Berlin. “Overall, the procedure has become much more confrontational and aggressive.”
At a science conference on the subject of “Opinion Formation 2.0 – Strategies in the struggle for interpretative sovereignty in the digital age,” Becker explained that Russia has flexibly adapted the content and tonality of its disinformation to its wartime activities and to the German and global debates. The organizer was the Center for Analysis and Research at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Inside, disinformation serves to legitimize and maintain the power of the President Wladimir Putin. The Russian state apparatus is trying to influence public opinion elsewhere through disinformation.
“In Germany, the trust of the population in politics, administration, but also in the free media is to be undermined. Our alliances and communities of values with the EU and NATO are also to be discredited and weakened,” explained Becker. To this end, Russia constantly takes up current conflict issues and exploits them in its own interests.
“Russian government agencies use many opportunities to spread disinformation, both directly and indirectly.” This applies to the official announcements by Putin and his “echo chambers” in government and parliament, state media, information portals operated by the intelligence services and social media.
“The many small propagandistic pinpricks via these diverse channels are usually rather insignificant and usually not relevant to security,” said the expert on counterintelligence. “But in the overall view, this disinformation can still have an effect.” In the end, actors from another state could succeed in “shaping a climate of scepticism, rejection or distrust”. In other words: “Disinformation is like a breeding ground for discrediting democracy.”
As an example of disinformation, Becker cited Facebook accounts that last spring referred to copies of the websites of German government agencies such as the Federal Ministry of the Interior. “The layout of the page is reproduced 1 to 1, neatly in the corporate design of the federal government.” A fake bill with changes to migration law was then posted on the site. “German sponsors were asked to report to the authorities that people from the Ukraine had rented an apartment.”
Another example: In March 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense tried to discredit the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health. “The ministry in Moscow spread the crude claim that the institute, together with Ukrainian authorities and other Western countries, is infecting bats, birds and reptiles with communicable diseases in order to then let them cross the Russian border as bioweapons.” Most recently, the migratory birds as bioweapons roamed the Russian disinformation space in May 2023 – “repeated like a mantra, artificially pseudo-updated with the help of allegedly new evidence and more and more statements from supposed experts.”
From the point of view of the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, the fact that disinformation with pseudo-facts is getting hold of more and more people in this country is highly risky. At the conference, he warned, if the facts no longer matter and reality is reduced to world views, democratic pluralism will lose its foundation. “We are then no longer common residents of the same real world when we return from virtual parallel worlds with different truths.”
An open society tolerates many opinions, but not many absolute truths, said Haldenwang. “Here we see the linden leaf between the shoulder blades of democracy. A sore spot for their enemies to attack. And they are doing it.”/sk/DP/ngu