A Russian disinformation campaign is seeking to boost the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), undermine mainstream German parties and sow worries about the economy ahead of the country’s Feb. 23 election, a think-tank has found. German think-tank CeMAS said it had tracked down hundreds of German-language posts on social media platform X over the past month exhibiting what it said were typical patterns of Russia’s Doppelgaenger disinformation campaign against the West that German, U.S. and French authorities have previously denounced. The campaign, created after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to undermine Western support for Kyiv, spreads links to falsified Western news outlets sharing false information, according to a German foreign ministry report published last June.
