Η Γερμανία -παρά τις όποιες θρυλούμενες σχέσεις της καγκελαρίου Μέρκελ με το κομμουνιστικό παρελθόν της Ανατολικής Γερμανίας και προσωπικά με τον Βλαντιμίρ Πούτιν, που επίσης, ως πράκτορας της KGB, είχε δραστηριοποιηθεί στη Δρέσδη της Ανατολικής Γερμανίας από το 1985 ως το 1990- πιεζόμενη πλέον από τη νέα φιλελεύθερη διοίκηση στο Λευκό Οίκο αρχίζει να βάζει στο στόχαστρο τα δόλια πλοκάμια του Κρεμλίνου σε όλα τα πεδία.
Έτσι, αλλάζοντας τη μέχρι τώρα στάση της, η Χριστιανοδημοκρατική Ένωση (CDU) της Γερμανίας δέχθηκε πλέον την αποπομπή του φιλορωσικού Ακροδεξιού κόμματος του Ούγγρου Πρωθυπουργού Βίκτωρα Ορμπάν από το Ευρωπαϊκό Λαϊκό Κόμμα (ΕΛΚ), αφού οι αρχές και οι πολιτικές του είναι ασυμβίβαστες με αυτά της Ευρωπαϊκής Κεντροδεξιάς. Ταυτόχρονα, οι υπηρεσίες ασφαλείας της Γερμανίας θέτουν πλέον ευθέως στο στόχαστρο τα δίκτυα ρωσικής προπαγάνδας στη χώρα, αλλά και στην Ευρώπη, όπως το RT.
Το αποκαλυπτικό εκτενές ρεπορτάζ στο έγκριτο γερμανικό περιοδικό Der Spiegel δίνει τον τόνο της αφύπνισης της φιλελεύθερης Δύσης και της αντίστασής της στα καταχθόνια σχέδια της Αυτοκρατορίας του Κακού, της Ρωσίας του Πούτιν.
Διαβάσετε παρακάτω με προσοχή το άρθρο του Der Spiegel. Η στρατηγική του Κρεμλίνου εκτυλίσσεται με πανομοιότυπο τρόπο σε όλες τις χώρες του Ελεύθερου Κόσμου. Η ενίσχυση και υπόθαλψη πολιτικών και κοινωνικών αναταραχών, η υποστήριξη ταυτόχρονα σε όλες τις δυνάμεις των Άκρων, Ακροδεξιές και Ακροαριστερές, είναι πρακτικές που θα μας βοηθήσουν να κατανοήσουμε και πολλά από όσα έχουν συμβεί και συνεχίζουν να συμβαίνουν εδώ και πολλά χρόνια και στην Ελλάδα.
The Disinformation Station
Germany Fears Influence of Russian Propaganda Channel
With RT DE, Moscow wants to provide a platform for corona skeptics, right-wing populists and leftist fans of the Kremlin to destabilize democracy in Germany. Internal emails provide insights into the media organization.
The call to order from Moscow came at 2 p.m. on Oct. 23, 2020, per video
call. That Friday, RT DE, the German-language arm of the Russian state-funded
television channel RT, had a news story on its website: "China and Germany
Are Becoming Superpowers.” According to the report, Vladimir Putin had said as
much during a video conference. A photo of the Russian president was at the top
of the story. Putin was further quoted as saying that the absolute dominance of
the U.S. was passé.
The powers-that-be in Moscow were not happy. Not because they thought
the story was inaccurate, but because it only appeared online 20 hours after
Putin had made his remarks.
So, they called the staff of the German branch of the broadcaster to
voice their displeasure. "They really ripped into us,” say call
participants. They were told that such a thing should never happen again, they
say. Important statements from Putin needed to appear on the website much
faster, they were told.
RT DE, which had been called RT Deutsch until November, has been
disseminating Kremlin-financed propaganda in Germany since 2014. Germany’s
domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the
Constitution, which has been keeping an eye on the platform, says the outlet is
seeking to weaken trust in democratic institutions. The agency says there are
close links between the station and those seeking to undermine the democratic
order in Germany in addition to conspiracy theorists. And it considers the news
disseminated by RT DE to be part of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by
the Russian state.
Internal documents from the media platform that DER SPIEGEL has seen show
the extent to which German staff are required to follow instructions from
Moscow, and how political those instructions are.
RT DE is part of a Russian media network that also includes the video
news agency Ruptly and the production company Redfish. The platform publishes
articles, photos and videos on its own website, on YouTube and via other social
networks.
The platform doesn’t post a detailed masthead on its website in the way
that most German or traditional media establishments do. And even those employees
DER SPIEGEL was able to speak with don’t know how many people actually work for
the organization. They estimate the number to be around 70 to 100. When
contacted, RT DE said "the employee figures are accurate in this order of
magnitude.” However, "we intend to significantly increase our team to more
than double its size as quickly as possible," the organization added,
saying it is "currently in the active hiring process." Just in time,
of course, for Germany’s next federal election in September.
RT DE's website states that its creators "want to provide a
counterpoint to the one-sided and often interest-driven mainstream media with
its German-language program.” The aim is to create a "counter-public.” In
one video, the broadcaster refers to itself as "a green menace,” a
reference to the color of its logo, and describes others as "enemies.”
Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief in Moscow, recently stated: "We
defend our country like the army."
For the broadcaster’s 15th anniversary in December, the Moscow TV
station offered itself congratulations in the form of a video. It featured
semi-realistic animated heads-of-state including then-U.S. President Donald
Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel. The German
chancellor is seen visiting a therapist because she feels persecuted. Alluding
to the poison attack on Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, Merkel
examines water bottles, wipes them down and then draws the curtains. "They
work 24/7,” she tells the therapist. When the therapist asks "who,” Merkel
taps on her smartphone and holds it out to her. RT is written on it. The video
ends with the words: "They’re crazy about us.”
The German-language broadcaster RT DE, this much is clear, likes to make
itself look bigger than it really is. But its influence does appear to be
growing, especially since the coronavirus pandemic and Navalny’s poisoning. The
organization announced a month ago that it intends to expand further by
launching a regular, 24-hour TV station to be aired from Berlin.
The platform doesn’t disseminate completely fabricated fake news, the
disinformation is more subtle. The reporters distort and neglect facts, thus
sowing distrust of the authorities, politicians and the established media.
Internal documents show they deliberately stay away from obvious conspiracy
narratives.
For example, according to an internal email sent in February, employees
were told that they should not claim that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
in the United States were orchestrated by the U.S. government. Nor should they
claim that the coronavirus doesn’t exist. Although "that is not to say
that we are not ready to discuss some controversial ideas,” such as "the
effectiveness of PCR tests.”
There’s one example in the mail that shows just how thin the line is for
RT staff. It is, for example, not OK to write that the corona pandemic has been
"state proclaimed.” But it is fine to write that the pandemic had been
"declared by the WHO (World Health Organization)” because it is WHO that
made the crisis an official fact. The emphasis is on"declared," as is
understood by the audience.
When asked for comment, RT DE said they "naturally" wants to
"provide a forum for the relevant public opinion.” The broadcaster’s
standards, the statement continues, are currently applied and will be in the
future as well.
In recent months, RT DE has become one of the main platforms for
Germany’s so-called Querdenker, a movement made up of corona skeptics opposed
to the government’s coronavirus containment measures, and other groups
skeptical of the disease. The platform reports more about the protests against
the coronavirus measures than normal media do. Ruptly even broadcasts live
streams of the events.
The editorial strategy appears to be paying off for RT. "Our August
numbers are very good. Of course, 'Querdenken' rallies have helped a bit,"
Executive Director Dinara Toktosunova wrote in an email to the entire editorial
staff on Sept. 5, 2020. "We’ve also started September strong with our
strong coverage of Navalny’s case.”
In further emails, senior officials at the broadcaster said they were
pleased by the "150-180,000 views per day.” Stories about the coronavirus,
they continued, had achieved "very significant growth” and a 41-percent
increase in "unique users” relative to the previous year. In the past nine
months, the mail stated, they reached 14 million people.
When asked to comment, RT DE confirmed the authenticity of the email and
wrote: "We are pleased with this success."
This, however, is concerning to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.
"RT DE, along with Ruptly and Redfish, is a danger to democracy,” says the
head of one state branch of the domestic intelligence agency. "The Russian
state has realized that it can be used to achieve reach and impact." The
source says the platforms function as multipliers in disinformation campaigns. "Broadcasting
on all channels – exploiting the power of algorithms and taking advantage of
the low media literacy of many consumers – is unfortunately working very well,”
he says.
"The Russian Patient – Political Theater at Berlin’s Charité
Hospital,” for example, was the name of a video posted in August in which RT
DE’s founding editor-in-chief and now director of strategy development, Ivan
Rodionov, spoke about Navalny’s poisoning. With a string of video snippets and
screenshots, he suggests it’s not Russia that needs to clear up what happened.
Instead, the West has "questions to answer,” he says. "Who had access
to the patient after he landed in Berlin? Who got their hands on the samples
taken from him?” He also noted that Navalny wasn’t the first "assigned
patient with geopolitical implications” to be treated at Berlin’s Charité
University Hospital.
The video is just one in a series of pieces published that aim to
absolve Russia of guilt and try to play down the seriousness of the case. It’s
not by chance – there are clear instructions from the top. A February email,
for example, stated that RT was not speaking of a "poisoning" in the
Navalny case, but of a "suspected poisoning." By the time the email
was sent, there hadn't been any doubts for some time that Navalny was poisoned.
The email also discusses rules for articles about Crimea, which was
annexed by Russia. "With regard to Crimea, we do not speak of an
annexation,” the message states. "We refer to reintegration or we write
around the process.” That is "once again very important for ALL, including
those who were not present today,” the message says.
RT DE reports frequently about the annexation and writes, for example,
about "the non-violent reintegration of Crimea into the Russian Federation
in accordance with the will of the people.” The United Nations estimates that
more than 13,000 people have died so far in the war in Ukraine, which began a
few weeks after the occupation of Crimea.
When asked to comment, RT DE confirmed the authenticity of the message
and defended the instructions.
In general, staff in Berlin are required to abide by Moscow’s wishes.
"If we want to request high-level representatives, we should do so in
coordination with our RT colleagues,” reads one message from December. A staff
member is Moscow is responsible for handling such inquiries.
The message was triggered by a request from RT DE to interview Vladimir
Chizhov, the Russian ambassador to the European Union. The request from Berlin
was sent to Brussels from Moscow, though the interview ultimately didn't take
place.
RT DE said in response to a query that the instructions were in place
"to ensure a speedy, uniform and straightforward process.”
Some of the German staff are clearly completely in line with the
Kremlin. One of RT DE’s first employees, Yasmine P., still works for the
platform today. In 2004, she gave an interview and said that Vladimir Putin
"has very truthful views of the world – he addresses and explains many
problems that others simply hush up.” She seems to be quite taken by the
Russian president. That same year, Yasmine P. published a Compact
Edition book dedicated to Putin together with the extreme
right-wing publisher Jürgen Elsässer, whose Compact magazine is now under observation by Germany’s
domestic intelligence agency.
One high-ranking RT DE staffer, Sebastian Range, wrote articles for the
conspiracy theory magazine Hintergrund (Background) for years. His name is still
listed on the website's masthead. Some of his articles on the website
promulgated wild theories about 9/11.
Florian Warweg, who, like Range, is a so-called "final editor” at
RT DE, has been with the platform since the year of its founding. He used to be
active with the far-left Left Party in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood, but
these days, he’s best known for making a show of himself at the Federal Press
Conference, the location where many important government- and policy-related
press briefings are held in Berlin. And for his cynical tweets. In September,
for example, he posted a photo showing Navalny surrounded by his family in a
hospital bed at Charité Hospital in Berlin. He captioned it: "We present
what is said to be the 'deadliest nerve agent’ in the world: Novichok as a
beauty treatment – whether for Yulia #Skripal or now #Navalny."
Yulia Skripal was poisoned with Novichok in the UK in 2018 along with
her father, former Russian intelligence colonel and later defector Sergei
Skripal. Both barely survived the attack, and Navalny shared a similar fate
last year. Russian intelligence services have been blamed for the poison
attacks.
When asked about the three employees, RT DE wrote: Care has been taken
to ensure there are "diverse opinions and views on our team.” Employees
are required to adhere to "strict editorial standards and our commitment
to objectivity and balance.” Apart from that, the media organization said that
it does not comment on the private lives of its employees as a matter of
principle.
In addition to staff, freelance writers also work for the platform, and
they often comment on current events. These "guest editorials and opinion
pieces don’t necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff,” the website
states. In practice, though, items posted on the website seldom deviate from
the company line.
They include, for example, people like conflict researcher and Russia
proponent Leo Ensel, or Rainer Rupp, who in East Germany spied on NATO under
the codename "Topas” on behalf of the Stasi secret police. Karin Kneissl,
the former Austrian foreign minister and member of the right-wing populist
Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), who Putin danced with when he attended her
wedding in 2018, also contributes to RT DE. Other writers come from
intellectual backgrounds that fall somewhere between the German Communist Party
and the Marxist Junge
Welt newspaper in Germany.
This does not discourage all German officials and politicians from
speaking to reporters who work for RT DE. Rainer Wendt, for example, the
controversial national head of the German Police Union, seems to have no
reservations about the outlet and often provides comments on domestic security
issues. So does Horst Teltschik, once a confidant to German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl and former chairman of the respected Munich Security Conference. Or
Matthias Schepp, chairman of the board of the German-Russian Chamber of
Commerce and a former DER SPIEGEL journalist.
Of the German political parties, however, it is primarily members of the
right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) who like to lend their voices to RT
DE. Be it party leader Tino Chrupalla, the right-wing extremist head of the AfD
chapter in Thuringia Björn Höcke, or Waldemar Herdt, an ardent Russia fan and
member of the federal parliament, all are welcome interviewees on the platform.
When AfD politicians met with representatives of the Putin-backed Assad regime
in Syria in 2019, RT DE provided fitting coverage of the event. AfD
representatives didn't answer questions submitted to the party about its
contacts with RT DE.
But RT DE is even more popular among elements of the Left Party, some
roots of which lead back to the East German communist party. Andrej Hunko, the
European policy point man for the party in German parliament is happy to make
himself available, and he has the appropriate political positions - on NATO, on
Venezuela and on the United States. He’s not the only one in his parliamentary
group: Indeed, Kremlin-critical representatives refer to Hunko and Left Party
colleagues like Sahra Wagenknecht, Alexander Neu, Zaklin Nastic and Diether
Dehm as the "RT Faction.” The Left Party even hired away a journalist who
was with RT DE. He now works in the party's media and public relations
department in the Bundestag. When contacted for comment, the press office wrote
back that it complies with employee data protection and thus can’t answer any
questions about him.
Dehm seems to be closest to the platform. Weltnetz TV, an internet
project he founded with others, featured an interview with then-Editor-in-Chief
Rodionov just in time for the 2014 launch of RT Deutsch in Germany. One of
Dehm’s co-founders at Weltnetz TV was also a shareholder at the time in another
media company, Salve.tv. The regional television station in Thuringia began syndicating
a show from RT Deutsch ("Der fehlende Part") in 2015 and made
headlines across Germany. Dehm had also been in business with a former
shareholder of Salve.tv for years. Dehm left a request for comment unanswered.
When asked how important the pro-Kremlin platform is for the party’s
public relations work, Left Party leaders Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger
responded: "RT DE doesn’t play a major role in the party’s media and
public relations.”
Politicians from other parties have also spoken to RT, including
Economics Minister Peter Altmaier and Defense Minister Annegret
Kramp-Karrenbauer, both from Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union
(CDU), Katarina Barley and Sigmar Gabriel of the center-left Social Democrats
and Wolfgang Kubicki of the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP). Overall,
though, all parties aside from the AfD and the Left Party are far more cautious
in their approach to the propaganda channel.
A spokesperson for the national chapter of the FDP, for example, says
that headquarters has decided not to respond to inquiries from RT DE for the
time being. She says that RT DE produces "state-directed PR under the fig
leaf of purported journalistic neutrality.” It poses "a danger to the
quality and factuality of our political discourse.”
The CDU said that it responds to all media inquiries. The party adds,
however: "We don’t see Russia Today as a news channel.” The conservative
party says the broadcaster’s aim is "obviously disinformation and
one-sided reporting.” It is not a trustworthy source, the party added.
Meanwhile, Markus Blume, the general secretary of the Christian Social
Union, the Bavarian sister party to the CDU, says: "RT doesn’t produce in
journalism – it engages in targeted disinformation.” He then adds, "We
need to buttress our democracy and democratic discourse against that kind of
influence from abroad.”
The Social Democrats say they have virtually no contact with the
broadcaster. The SPD does, though deal with the broadcaster. Uli Grötsch, an
SPD parliamentarian focused on domestic affairs and a member of the
parliamentary committee that has oversight of intelligence matters, says that
RT DE has been a focus for himself and the Bundestag for years. He says
"the relevant parliamentary bodies focus intensively on Russian interference."
Parliament takes the problem "very seriously and is constantly discussing
suitable countermeasures,” he says.
The Greens are also "cautious” about requests from the platform, a
spokesman says. The party’s media policy coordinator in parliament, Margit
Stumpp, says the Kremlin-backed broadcaster’s announcement that it will soon
broadcast around the clock is "bad news for Germany as a democracy.” In
the long term, Stumpp sees "a significant influence on the formation of
public opinion to the detriment of confidence in our democracy.”
So far, however, RT DE has not attempted to obtain a broadcasting
license. The media organization hasn’t applied in either Berlin or Brandenburg,
says a spokesperson for the Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg, the authority
responsible for broadcast licenses in the two states. But there is still plenty
of time left before the planned launch in December and an application could
likely still be reviewed in that timeframe if it were submitted by this summer.
The main question is how RT DE intends to circumvent Germany’s
Interstate Broadcasting Treaty. The law prohibits broadcasting operations by
state agencies in Germany. There are, however, loopholes. One option would be
to move to another country. A license from another European Union member state
would make it possible to broadcast into Germany.
DER SPIEGEL learned in its reporting that the German authorities are
therefore in close contact with their colleagues in other EU countries.
