From Moscow with chaos: How Russia unites extremists across Germany

About a month after the Hamas-led terror attack in Israel on 7 October 2023, which killed almost 1,200 people and saw more than 250 taken hostage, blue Stars of David began appearing on walls across Paris.

At first, the incidents were assumed to be antisemitic, but investigations later suggested they were part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Two Moldovan couples are said to have spray-painted the stars on walls in the French capital for a small fee, following instructions from someone abroad.

The intention was to create confusion and mistrust rather than to send an explicitly antisemitic message.

From Putin memes to sabotage

In Germany, too, people are being hired to carry out small‑scale sabotage and espionage on behalf of foreign actors.

The Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), the domestic intelligence service (BfV) and the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) believe Russia is behind the recruitment of so‑called "low-level agents".

These "agents" are usually recruited via social media and paid small sums to carry out minor tasks, such as photographing critical or military infrastructure, committing arson, or spray‑painting graffiti.

"Sometimes they are recruited for ideological reasons," explained Austrian disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler. "What you're looking for are answers to the following questions: are they in any social media groups, have they already been radicalised? Are they desperate," Pichler told Euronews.

"Here in the West, there are often people who like Putin images or share related memes. They are then contacted, with the aim of slowly drawing them in and building them up," he added.

Political allegiance is largely irrelevant, because "Russia backs all extremist movements in Germany and across Europe," said terrorism expert Dr Hans Jakob Schindler, head of the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

For Russia, it doesn't matter whether the groups are left‑wing, right‑wing, or Islamist – what counts is the level of disruption they can create. According to Schindler, the aim isn't necessarily to cause direct damage. Instead, these networks form part of hybrid warfare, spreading division and insecurity across society.

From neo‑Nazis to Stalinists

While Russia's sabotage and espionage efforts are clearly aimed at harming Ukraine in response to Western support for Kyiv, its broader hybrid warfare campaign against the West is primarily about sowing chaos, insecurity, and division.

The president of the domestic intelligence agency (BfV), Sinan Selen, told RTL Nachtjournal Spezial that "the outreach isn't limited to individual people or parties."

However, Selen added, "what we do see is that these efforts are particularly strong at the political fringes. On both the left and the right, there are attempts to establish contacts, in the hope that they will be successful."

Extremism researcher Dr Johannes Kieß told Euronews that many extremist groups maintain ideological ties to Russia. "There are still far-right currents that hold traditional anti-Slavic views, as the Nazis once did," Kieß said.

But over the past few decades, the so-called New Right has shifted. Their focus has moved away from classical racial theory towards ethnopluralism. Kieß added that Russia has found a receptive audience among these groups.

Ethnopluralists believe each "ethnic" or cultural group needs its own space and identity, and that different groups should remain separate to preserve their "cultural purity".

Links to Russia

In his research on far-right extremism and other anti-democratic movements, Dr Johannes Kieß has repeatedly encountered evidence of Russian connections.

These, he said, are not strong enough to claim that any particular party or group is being directly controlled by Moscow, but there are clear overlaps and shared interests.

One striking example, he added, is the Freie Sachsen party. "It's well known that the party’s leader has long-standing ties to Russia," Kieß told Euronews.

"He studied there, travelled regularly, maintained contacts, and even represented Russian companies as a lawyer in Germany. But there's no evidence he received Russian money to build up Freie Sachsen," he explained.

"Still, those links exist, and the strategies are very similar. For instance, there was a Freie Sachsen delegation that visited Russia before the war escalated. And during the so-called refugee crisis after 2015, Russian fake accounts and online campaigns – especially in Russian-language networks in Germany – worked to inflame tensions. That's nothing new: we can trace Russian influence in this area back to 2015 or 2016," he explained.

According to Kieß, there's a broader ideological element at play: the rejection of modernity, modern society and everything associated with it – from feminism to liberal democracy. In this worldview, Russia is seen as the "counterweight" to the modern West and the United States.

Left-wing extremist groups, by contrast, reject NATO and the US for different reasons, seeing them as "imperialist powers" responsible – along with capitalism – for global inequality.

For many extremists, Russia becomes the natural alternative. "You even see neo-Nazis expressing solidarity with Palestine, claiming that the Palestinian people also have a right to self-determination – in line with their ethnopluralist thinking," Kieß said.

"It's partly provocation – a way of getting back at the left – but it also reveals a clear hostility towards Israel, the Jewish state. Those ideas overlap and merge very quickly."

Russian propaganda goes red

An example of this is the media outlet Redfish, which presented itself as a grassroots, left-wing news platform. According to a Vice investigation from March 2022, it was in fact a Kremlin propaganda project, described as a subsidiary of the Russian state-controlled company Ruptly GmbH.

Redfish targeted left-wing and progressive audiences, using genuine issues such as racism and colonialism to wrap pro-Russian narratives in a more credible guise. In 2023, it announced that it had been forced to close, but a successor quickly emerged under the name Red.

Germany's Foreign Office confirmed in June that Russia was again using the new outlet as part of a disinformation campaign aimed at dividing German society.

Until it shut down in May this year, Red was run by the Turkish media firm AFA Medya, whose founder, Hüseyin Doğru, is already on the EU sanctions list for his ties to Russia. Both are accused of attempting to undermine the democratic process in Germany.

On its website, Red published a statement criticising its closure and denying that it was a continuation of Russia Today's Redfish project or that it had encouraged pro-Palestinian protests in Germany.

It described itself instead as "an independent, anti-colonial outlet reporting for Palestine and against imperialism."

According to Kieß, antisemitism among parts of the left still bears the imprint of Stalinism. In the 1950s, Stalin spread virulent antisemitic propaganda – and traces of that ideology have since filtered into some Western European left-wing movements.

"In the end, both the far right and the far left tend to share a mindset centred on 'the people' versus 'the elites'. That kind of populist thinking carries elements that, in structure, are closely related to antisemitism," said extremism researcher Kieß.

This blend of political movements with pro-Russian sympathies is highly susceptible to Kremlin propaganda – and forms part of Russia's broader strategy of hybrid warfare. In this way, Moscow has managed to unsettle the West with a series of small but persistent provocations.

Hybrid warfare is described by experts in some cases as terrorism and compared in its methods to those of the so-called Islamic State group. Read more in the fourth part of the euronews series "Putin's Secret Terror in Germany" on Thursday.