A German employee of the AfD party is in close contact with the Russian Federal Security Service

He was a staff member of the AfD parliamentarian in the Bundestag, according to research, from woman In close contact with a senior official of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's intelligence service. The letters exchanged discussed, among other things, how to limit the supply of German weapons to Ukraine. According to research conducted by the weekly magazine In collaboration with a Riga-based platform The insider.

Vladimir Sergezhenko was born in Lviv in the then Soviet Union, and came to Germany in the 1990s. He has been active as a staffer for several politicians from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party for a number of years. He worked for former Bundestag member Ulrich Ohme, who traveled to Crimea at the Duma's expense in 2018 and praised the conduct of the Russian presidential elections. Sergezhenko now works for Bundestag member and Putin defender Eugene Schmidt, who was born in Kazakhstan and came to Germany as a “German Russian” — from a German minority in Soviet Russia — at the turn of the last century.

Russian state television

Sergezhenko's sympathies are also no secret. according to woman He regularly travels back and forth to Russia, including appearances on talk shows on Russian state television. At a meeting in Germany in November, Sergezhenko called on German politicians who wanted to supply weapons to “be removed from the political scene.”

Since spring 2023, according to woman, Serzhizhenko exchanged letters with an FSB colonel on how to stop German arms supplies to Ukraine. In a letter, Serzhizhenko proposes to file a complaint with the Constitutional Court to obstruct the delivery of weapons, and requests financial support from Moscow. In the summer, the AfD filed a complaint with the court, claiming that the government should not have provided the weapons without consulting parliament. The Alternative for Germany party in the Bundestag denies this woman That the trial has anything to do with Sergizhenko or that he received money for it.

Serzhizhenko says he has nothing to do with the FSB man. However, he was denied a permit to enter the Bundestag two months ago.

Fake accounts

New cases of Russian espionage and influence continue to emerge in Germany. In December, the case was opened in Berlin against Carsten L., a former employee of the German intelligence service, who is suspected of handing over documents to the FSB as a double agent, in particular information about the positioning of Ukrainian anti-aircraft defences. .

The Foreign Ministry in Berlin revealed last January that within four weeks, employees were able to identify 50,000 fake accounts on the X website, which distributed more than a million tweets in German. These messages mainly criticize arms supplies and the government in Berlin, claiming that aid to Ukraine comes at the expense of German citizens.

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