Coordinated falsehoods and influence campaigns target German elections, including conscription rumors and smear narratives

Ahead of Germany's federal election on 23 February 2025, researchers and a pan-European newsroom collaboration documented a wave of coordinated falsehoods and influence campaigns aimed at German voters. A cross-border investigation coordinated by Spain's public broadcaster RTVE under the EBU's Investigative Journalism Network, published on 12 March 2025 as Playing with Fire, mapped more than 60 confirmed or suspected Russian hybrid operations across Europe, including disinformation targeting the German vote. The investigation drew on interviews with government, intelligence and military officials and experts across ten countries.

Among the documented narratives were fabricated posts claiming Germany would conscript and mobilise 500,000 soldiers for a military mission in Eastern Europe by May 2025, and a false claim that Germany planned to import 1.9 million Kenyan workers. The same effort circulated baseless child-abuse and corruption allegations against Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, CDU chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Reporting tied much of this content to Storm-1516, an operation linked to structures founded by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Separately, the German fact-checking outlet Correctiv exposed in January 2025 a network of more than 100 German-language fake news sites, attributed to US fugitive John Mark Dougan operating from Moscow, that amplified AI-generated smears using deepfake-style video and audio. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented a related cluster of accounts producing videos falsely branded with the logos of Deutsche Welle, the BBC and Sky News, mirroring tactics of the Doppelganger and Operation Overload campaigns.

Officials and researchers assess these operations as Russia-aligned, but attribution varies by component: the fake-site network and named operations such as Storm-1516, Doppelganger and Operation Overload are documented with technical and infrastructure evidence, while the broader claim of a unified Kremlin-directed effort remains an assessment rather than a proven command structure. The conscription rumour, fabricated migration figures and politician smears were debunked and gained limited reach. The pattern is consistent with prior interference around the 2024 European elections, suggesting sustained, adaptive Russian information operations rather than isolated incidents.