Soldiers from the German Bundeswehr knock on the door of a typical German house and tell its inhabitants: “You are aware of the terrible war in Ukraine and how horrible life has become for people there? We must take all your belongings and send them to Ukraine.” In the video, which went viral in Germany, the soldiers pack up the family’s belongings. When they have emptied the house, they salute a photograph of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, saying “Heil Zelenskiy”.
The video was made by RT, the state-owned Russian international news network, using actors with impeccable German accents. “I don’t know what the impact was, how many people believed it, but it was a crass example of fake news produced by Russia to manipulate our public opinion and turn it against Ukraine,” says Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, a former head of Nato intelligence and former German ambassador to Poland.
Von Loringhoven recently published Putin’s Attack on Germany: Disinformation, Propaganda, Cyberattacks with the German media scientist Leon Erlenhorst. “Our central thesis is that Germany is the main target in Europe of Russia’s information war,” he says.
Germany is targeted because of its prominence in Europe, and what von Loringhoven calls its “track record of pacifism and sympathies towards Russia”. He traces the latter back to the success of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. Later, Germany’s good relations with Mikhail Gorbachev led to reunification and helped end the cold war.
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Putin was determined to reverse Russia’s cold war defeat, but Germany clung to its illusions. The German term Putinversteher – literally, “Putin understander” – became a derogatory term for Germans who were soft on the Russian dictator.
In an address to the Russian Academy of Military Science in 2013, Gen Valery Gerasimov, the chief of staff of Russia’s armed forces, emphasised “the importance of controlling the information space and the real-time co-ordination of all aspects of a campaign.” Western analysts have been parsing the Russian concept of hybrid warfare, which combines military and non-military means, ever since. Putin’s Russia has, von Loringhoven says, sought to undermine western power through a vast campaign of disinformation and sabotage.
Donald Trump promises “to prevent World War III”. But with North Korean soldiers fighting Ukrainians in Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran supplying weapons to Moscow, and Moscow cutting cables on the floor of the Baltic Sea, planting incendiary devices in western cargo aircraft and attempting to assassinate the chief executive of Germany’s leading armaments manufacturer, we are in a sense already in the third world war.
Russia uses Doppelgänger websites – near identical replicas of well-established media, filled with pro-Russian content – to manipulate public opinion in western countries. Articles from these fake websites are then spread by bots. It usually takes a digital forensics expert to notice the fraud.
“Content is sent in pulses, 24/7,” says von Loringhoven. “Humans would not spread information that way on social media. In the end you have a massive, one-sided accumulation of pro-Russian, pro-Kremlin content. This is not media freedom.”
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Russia used such methods to favour the election of Calin Georgescu, an ultranationalist, pro-Russian candidate, in Romania’s presidential poll in December. US vice-president JD Vance portrayed the election’s annulment as a violation of freedom of expression.
NewsGuard, a US company which rates the reliability of online information, reported this month that the Russian website Pravda has infected the outputs of leading western artificial intelligence systems with 3.6 million articles containing Russian disinformation and propaganda.
Von Loringhoven says western societies must do more to protect themselves from Russia’s hybrid warfare. Regulation, he stresses, does not mean censorship, but “giving context to content”. Rather than take down misleading or inflammatory content, the platform should indicate its origin and stop one-sided amplification of narratives. Authorities should react early to disinformation campaigns, before they become viral, and raise public awareness of Russian methods of manipulation of the internet and social media. Western governments should retaliate with facts, not lies or fake news. “For example,” says von Loringhoven, “Russia does not tell its people the real cost in dead and wounded of the war in Ukraine. We have those figures.”
Facebook, X and TikTok have all been linked to Russian disinformation campaigns. “The regulation of social media platforms is extremely important, because this is now the main battlefield,” von Loringhoven says. The EU’s Digital Services Act, which is intended to prevent distortions of free speech, is vehemently opposed by Trump and his tech executive allies. “The EU and US have fundamentally different opinions on this, and we are going into a conflict,” says von Loringhoven. “I am very much in favour of not backing down.”
On February 28th, the day Trump and Vance humiliated Zelenskiy in the Oval Office, the cybersecurity reporter Martin Matishak reported in The Record that Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had ordered US Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia.
“I cannot understand this at all,” says von Loringhoven, “because there is very clear evidence that Russia has been manipulating the US in many ways, through social media platforms and the internet. To protect American democracy, it is vital to fend this off, to resist this.”
