Is Russia winning its hybrid war against Germany?
Dear Reader,
The first thing to say about Swiftair Flight 5960, the cargo jet that was supposed to land in Vilnius after taking off from Leipzig Airport on Monday morning, is that we don’t yet have definitive answers on why it crashed.
We know that the Boeing-built jet hit the ground a kilometre short of the runway, and that it erupted in a fireball seconds later. Miraculously, three of the four crew members survived.
Why it crashed in normal conditions remains a mystery... at least publicly.
German investigators have now been sent to Vilnius to assist their Lithuanian colleagues in the investigation.
However, it is already apparent that the German defence establishment suspects foul play. Carsten Breuer, head of the German armed forces, said on Tuesday that the crash “fits into a pattern” of previous Russian sabotage attempts.
He was referring to a package that caught fire at Leipzig Airport, the main cargo hub for central Europe, after arriving in a shipment from Vilnius in July. German intelligence suspect that Kremlin agents sent the package. In October they issued an unusually specific warning that Russia is planning to target air cargo as part of an escalating shadow war against Europe.
Olaf Scholz, a man who chooses his words very carefully, said this week that it “could be the case” that Russia was behind the plane crash. Coming from Scholz, those four words are a lot less equivocal than they appear.
How could the Russians have brought the plane down?
Aviation authorities in the Baltic region have been warning for months about GPS blocking from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which lies between Lithuania and Poland. This practice knocks out the main navigation system that pilots use during flight.
Flight 5960 flew within a few kilometres of Kaliningrad on its way to Vilnius; real time flight data shows its GPS data disappearing near Kaliningrad before returning shortly afterwards.
On the ground in Lithuania, authorities are looking at whether an issue with the runway landing system caused the accident. Later on Monday, a Polish aircraft spent hours in the air testing the runway’s Instrument Landing System (ILS), a guidance tool that helps planes to land at night.
According to Harshad Sathaye, a researcher at ETH Zürich who has published work on the vulnerability of ILS to sabotage attacks, it is feasible that someone managed to override the system to confuse the pilot.
“A sufficiently equipped and motivated adversary in theory could cause such issues, but I can’t say for certain,” he told me.
Sathaye pointed out that the pilot had other gauges, such as an altimeter, that should have warned him that he was flying too low. The crash was probably caused by on-board equipment failure “since implementing such attacks is not that straightforward,” was his initial conclusion. He added that analysis of the aircraft’s black box and GPS data should provide definite answers.
Clearly, there could be a more innocent explanation for the crash. What is also obvious, though, is that Russia has both the motive and the track record to make sabotage seem all too plausible.
This would mark the first time that Russian agents deliberately killed a western civilian on western soil - it would be a major escalation in a hybrid war against the countries who are supporting Ukraine.
But it is far from an isolated incident.
German intelligence officials warn that Moscow has long since decided we are its enemy, and hybrid warfare - incidents below the threshold of a declaration of war - are its preferred method.
The aim of these attacks? To increase fear among the public that the war is escalating, and to erode support for Ukraine.
“Whether we want it or not, we are in a direct confrontation with Russia. Putin decided long ago that we are his enemy,” Bruno Kahl, head of the BND, Germany foreign intelligence service, told the Bundestag earlier this year.
What’s more, Germany is one of Putin's central targets.
“The Kremlin sees Germany as a key decision-maker in the EU and NATO when it comes to weapons supplies and sanctions. At the same time it sees Germany as easy prey. This combination of influence and weakness makes us the ideal target,” Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, a former senior BND official, told Der Spiegel in October.
Why does Russia see Germany as so vulnerable? Firstly, because it has some of the weakest counter-espionage capabilities in the West, making it easy to penetrate. Secondly, because the German public are seen as susceptible to both intimidation and defeatism.
Barely a month has passed this year without an attempt by Russian agents to unsettle the German public in some way or another.
In March, Moscow published a wiretapped phone call in which Luftwaffe officers discussed supplying Ukraine with cruise missiles, which it tried to present as proof that the German military wanted war; in April, German prosecutors arrested two Russian nationals they suspect of planning attacks on military infrastructure; in July, western intelligence agencies reportedly foiled a Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the CEO of German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall; in August, someone tried to break into the water station at an army base in Cologne; in the same month, drones were observed in a no-fly zone above a decommissioned nuclear plant outside Hamburg; earlier this month, an undersea internet cable connecting Germany to Finland was severed.
We have probably even felt the effects of this hybrid war in the German capital.
In May, my mobile phone started to vibrate frantically. I had just received an emergency alert warning of the “extreme danger” posed by smoke from a factory fire in the south of Berlin. The alert advised me to immediately close all my windows.
Looking out to the south, I could see a thick plume of smoke rising from a building barely three kilometres away. It took several hours before the all clear was given.
The factory that burned down belonged to Diehl, the arms manufacturer which supplies IRIS-T air defence systems to Kyiv. This factory was used for constructing car parts, but rumours quickly spread that Russian agents were behind the fire.
Berlin police later announced that the blaze was the result of a “technical fault”. But both the Wall Street Journal and Bild Zeitung reported that foreign intelligence officials had passed on information to their German colleagues which provided “concrete evidence" of Russian involvement.
However, sabotage is just one string to the bow of Russia' campaign of hybrid warfare. Much less spectacular is the deluge of online propaganda.
As part of a campaign called Doppelgänger, Russian "cyber soldiers" have created copycat versions of German news sites, or set up “alternative media” sites to provide “the truth” on what is going on in Ukraine. An army of bots promote these fake websites on social media platforms.
Alternatively, these fully-automated bots act as if they are real people and complain about their energy prices going up because Germany is spending too much on Ukraine.
Run by a Kremlin-funded organisation called the Social Design Agency, the campaign has two central aims: “to increase the AfD's vote share to 20 percent” and to foster a general mood among the German public that Ukraine war is impoverishing their country.
In many instances, the Russian trolls simply copy the source code of a major German news outlet’s website, allowing them to create pages that are identical. Only readers who look closer realise that the domain name is spelled wrong, or the headline is implausibly pro-Russian.
The unregulated nature of the internet makes it almost impossible to stop this behaviour. Western law enforcement agencies close down a website, but a new one will pop up soon after under a slightly different name.
Analysis of the Doppelgänger programme by the German Foreign Ministry found that it was responsible for some 13,000 German-language articles over a 12-month period from May 2023 to May 2024.
At the same time, many of these fakes are crude and unlikely to fool more sophisticated readers. The extent to which this Russian campaign is effective is an open question.
"If Russia spends billions of euros a year on it, the Kremlin clearly assumes that it works," former BND man Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven told Der Spiegel. "It may not directly change election results, but it has an insidious effect… we are observing a creeping loss of solidarity with Ukraine and (good) election results for the AfD and BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht). Is this all a coincidence? I don't think so.”
The Center für Monitoring, Analyse und Strategie, a Berlin-based think tank that focuses on Russian propaganda, is less sure of its impact. “The disinformation campaign is aggressive, persistent and flexible” but “its actual influence on public opinion appears to be limited due to the sometimes low quality of the content,” it stated in a recent report.
At the very least, we can see that German fears of being dragged into a war have shot up in the past three years, while support for supplying weapons to Ukraine is slowly eroding.
An ARD poll found that, between 2023 and 2024, the proportion of Germans who want Berlin to reduce its military support went up from 31 percent to 36 percent, while the percent of people who thought it was appropriate or didn’t go far enough dropped from 63 percent to 56 percent.
Another poll, published in September by Ipsos, found that 51 percent of Germans said that their country shouldn’t supply Kyiv with any more weapons.
Of course, it is impossible to say whether Russian intimidation and manipulation have played their part or whether the German public were always going to slump back into their reflexive culture of appeasement once the initial shock of the invasion had passed.
Helping the Kremlin is fact that the AfD and BSW are just waiting for the chance to work as their volunteer spokespeople.
The pattern is always the same: when Nato increases its military aid to Ukraine, the AfD and Wagenknecht loudly condemn it as “war mongering” and “a dangerous escalation.” When Russia is caught plotting sabotage in Europe they keep their mouths shut.
Predictably, after the DHL crash in Vilnius no one at the top of the AfD or BSW saw it as necessary to comment.
It was left to Siegbert Droese, AfD member of the European Parliament for Leipzig, to give his expert analysis on what happened after the flight left the city airport.
As someone who “knows a thing or two about aviation” through his seat on the EU transport committee, Droese warned that DHL planes were “most likely” being used to transport weapons “or even troops.” As for the cause of the accident, he pointed out that the plane was built by Boeing (“not always the most reliable firm of late”) and was a veritable museum piece at 31 years old.
“We certainly won’t be making accusations against the ‘evil Russians’ before the official investigation is over,” he said in a video posted on Instagram. “It could have just been an aviation accident, which unfortunately happen time and again.”
Too crude for anyone to fall for? The AfD are on course to win 19 percent of the vote at the federal election - just a point blow the Kremlin’s target.