ToAnnalena Berbok, an opponent of establishing relations with Russia, was allegedly subjected to a disinformation campaign. The Kremlin is ready to do anything to block her path to power, Bloomberg claims
Annalena Berbock
The Kremlin has launched a campaign against the candidate for the post of German Chancellor, Annalena Berbock, the co-chairman of the Union 90/Greens party, Bloomberg writes, citing sources.
& laquo;Burbok & lt;…& gt; attracts the attention of the Kremlin with its belligerent attitude towards Russia, and its blunders during the election campaign made it vulnerable, & mdash; the publication says.
According to the agency, Russia considered the 40-year-old Berbok a threat to its interests after she briefly became a leader in the struggle for the post of chancellor, according to exit polls conducted on the eve of the September elections.
The candidate from the Greens, as Bloomberg notes, opposes the construction of the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline, which is of particular concern to Moscow. A source close to the Russian government told the agency that the Kremlin is ready to do anything to block her path to power.
The Kremlin fears that Berbok’s victory in the elections will deal a serious blow to Russia’s global interests, destroy its ties with Germany and benefit the United States, two people familiar with the position of the Russian leadership told the agency.
According to Bloomberg sources, the Kremlin’s set of tools, which was used to support the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election in 2016, includes disinformation campaigns on social networks and also hacking operations to capture confidential information that can be distributed at the right time. An agency source close to the Kremlin said that Moscow already has enough information that can harm Berbok, who is “politically naive and too sympathetic to the United States”.
The official representative of the Green Party, Jan Helting, said that there are alarming signs of cyber attacks on the computer network of party officials, as well as an increase in the activity of Kremlin-linked websites aimed at discrediting individual green politicians.
According to a source close to the party, lawmakers and employees of the Bundestag observed a wave of phishing attacks on the mail of party members. “Such messages often contain malware or software that can spy on party systems,” the publication says.
German counterintelligence, as reported by Bloomberg, believes that it is Russia that uses such a scheme. First, hackers attack lower-level party members who are the most vulnerable, and only then get access to high-ranking ones.
The agency notes that the German counterintelligence service directly warned about the threat of cyberactivity coming from Russia on the eve of the September 26 elections, including from the hacker group APT 28, also known as Fancy Bear, allegedly associated with Russian special services.
According to Bloomberg, a disinformation campaign has also unfolded directly against Berbok. In one of the articles that appeared on Facebook, her statement was published about the need to cancel widows ‘ pensions in order to finance a program to support refugees. The German edition of Correctiv in May claimed that this message was distributed 2,800 times during the day, although at that time no one publicly stated that Russia was involved in the fake publication.
According to Helting, the number of such messages with falsified quotes and images of Berbok has steadily increased since her candidacy for the post of Chancellor, including on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram.
According to a study published by Der Spiegel, Berbok and the “Greens” are subjected to a much greater number of attacks on social networks than the party members of the current Chancellor Angela Merkel. From a sample of posts on social networks, Spiegel counted more than 63 thousand messages directed against Berbok, which is three times more than the candidate from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its leader Armin Lachet. The candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Olaf Scholz, had only 4 thousand such messages.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not respond to a request from Bloomberg. RBC has contacted Annalena Berbock for comment.
Peskov has previously stated that Russia has never interfered in the electoral processes of other countries. “The results of repeated investigations conducted in America confirm that Russia has never interfered,” the presidential press secretary said.
Moscow has repeatedly denied involvement in such actions. The United States is regularly accused of interfering in the elections of Russia: it was about the 2016 elections, in which Donald Trump won, and the 2020 elections, when Joe Biden became president. The day before, he again accused Russia, this time of interfering in the congressional elections to be held next year.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was devoted to Trump’s ties with Moscow and interference in the 2016 election. As a result, it was not possible to find concrete evidence of Moscow’s involvement, but both Mueller himself and other high-ranking US officials subsequently stated that they did not doubt the interference.
The State Duma stated that the accusations against Moscow are attempts by Western countries to disguise their own interference in Russian electoral processes. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also did not rule out provocations from abroad and attempts to destabilize the situation before the September elections to the State Duma.
RBC on YouTube Live broadcasts, videos and recordings of broadcasts on our YouTube channel