Germany summons Russian ambassador over alleged election interference and cyberattacks

Berlin summoned the Russian ambassador on Friday following accusations of sabotage, cyberattacks and interference in German elections, a spokesperson for the German foreign ministry said.

Russia is believed to be behind a massive cyberattack on Germany's air traffic control in August 2024.

"We can now clearly attribute the cyberattack against German Air Safety in August 2024 to the hacker collective APT28, also known as Fancy Bear,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that the hacker group is believed to have links to Russia's military intelligence service GRU.

The German foreign ministry also said it can now be "definitively stated" that Russia attempted to influence the previous general elections and has meddled in Germany's domestic affairs.

"Russia is thus very specifically threatening our security," the statement added, saying such interference aims to divide German society and systematically undermine trust in state institutions.

Disinformation during election campaigns

Parallel to cyberattacks, security authorities registered a targeted disinformation campaign during February's snap federal elections.

According to Western security and IT experts, the propagandist group behind the campaign was Storm-1516, considered to be state-controlled and linked to Russia.

"We can now state definitively that Russia, through the Storm 1516 campaign, sought to influence and destabilise the most recent federal election," the foreign ministry said.

The group is said to have deliberately spread false information about leading German politicians. In one of the campaigns, the then leading Green Party candidate Robert Habeck was accused of involvement in a multi-million euro corruption scandal in which Ukrainian politicians were also allegedly involved.

However, there was no evidence for these claims.

Several manipulated videos suggested electoral fraud in postal voting. Alleged ballot papers from a Leipzig constituency were shown on which the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was missing.

The city of Leipzig immediately rejected the allegations and spoke of a targeted disinformation campaign.

Storm-1516, which experts believe has been active since 2023 and was allegedly involved in the 2024 US presidential election, expanded its activities shortly before February's snap polls.

The foreign ministry said that Germany "would take a series of countermeasures to make Russia pay a price for its hybrid actions in close coordination with our European partners."

Berlin would support "new individual sanctions against hybrid actors on a European level," but gave no further details.

According to the BILD newspaper, Russian Ambassador to Germany Sergey Nechayev has already visited the foreign ministry in Berlin and his talks with officials there have ended.

The Russian embassy in Berlin has made no comment.