According to PAP's AfD source, in the summer – already in the new term of the Bundestag and after the Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz was sworn in as head of government – a group of supporters of the group from Thuringia visited the Russian embassy in Berlin. The visit was organized by the office of Kaufmann, who is from this region. As PAP's interlocutor emphasized, the meeting was not attended by other Bundestag deputies, but by AfD colleagues and sympathizers from Thuringia. The AfD's Thuringian structures have been classified by German counterintelligence as a “confirmed far-right group” since 2021.
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Who organized the visits to the Russian embassy?
What was the nature of the visits to the embassy?
Why did AfD politicians want to fly to Sochi?
What are the concerns of the German Ministry of Defense?
“As part of the visit, embassy employees presented the history of the building and Russian-German relations from a historical perspective, trying to avoid sensitive topics,” said a source in the AfD who wished to remain anonymous.
According to this person, guests from the Thuringian AfD “appeared to be favorable to Russia.” “I had the impression that they would like good relations between Germany and Russia,” she added.
Kaufmann defends the project. “Only touristic nature”
The summer visit was not the first event of this type organized by Kaufmann's parliamentary office. In response to PAP's inquiry, the politician confirmed that his office had prepared visits to the Russian embassy in Berlin several times. “Participants (meetings – PAP) from my constituency have repeatedly expressed their desire to visit the Russian embassy, which is why we have organized such a visit several times,” he said.
Kaufmann recalled that each deputy's office organizes information trips to Berlin three times a year for interested citizens from his district. “In cooperation with the Federal Government Press and Information Office (BPA), a rich program is being developed, including visits to the Reichstag building, ministries, museums, memorial sites, as well as visits to the city and its monuments,” he noted.
According to the AfD MP, “the visit to the Russian embassy included a lecture on history and a tour of the accessible parts of the building, but no meetings or conversations with official representatives took place.” “These visits were purely of a tourist nature,” Kaufmann emphasized.
Debate about possible AfD connections with Russia. Maier accuses the party of “possible actions to benefit Moscow”
The visit of the Thuringian guests to the Russian embassy was not an isolated case. In September, a similar meeting at a Russian diplomatic mission, organized for AfD supporters from Brandenburg by the party's MP Birgit Bessin, was widely commented on. She shared a group photo from the event on social media and took part in it herself. There are no such photos on Kaufmann's social media accounts.
Trips co-organized by BPA are financed from public funds. The government covers travel, accommodation and part of the food costs. The aim of the visits is to support political education and enable citizens to learn about the work of parliament. In theory, the trips are intended for committed residents of a given MP's constituency, but in practice they are often used by the same local activists and party collaborators.
The debate about AfD's possible ties with Russia gained momentum in Germany after the words of the head of the Interior Ministry of Thuringia, Georg Maier, who suggested that the party's politicians may act to benefit Moscow. Maier said that AfD deputies to the Thuringian parliament submit numerous interpellations regarding critical infrastructure in the region, details of military transports and defense against drones.
The Ministry of Defense expresses concerns. It's about the Bundeswehr's internal problems
As reported by the weekly “Der Spiegel”, the German Ministry of Defense is afraid that the AfD may use interpellations to obtain data about the Bundeswehr's internal problems. According to the newspaper, the ministry believes that “questionnaires from Moscow are being developed” regarding both the operational capabilities of the German army and the equipment purchase schedules.
The AfD denies allegations of using sensitive information for the benefit of foreign countries. Party politicians claim that parliamentary inquiries help them “reveal the government's mistakes”, which – as AfD Secretary General in the Bundestag Bernd Baumann emphasized – applies “especially to the condition of the entire infrastructure and the Bundeswehr”. They were – in his opinion – “ruined by the austerity measures” ordered by the ruling coalition of the Christian Democrats from the CDU/CSU and the social democrats from the SPD. He added that the answers to the interpellations of AfD politicians are public and everyone has access to them. “If something was secret, the government would not have to answer,” Baumann noted.
According to reports from the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” daily, three AfD deputies from the Saxony-Anhalt parliament took part in a ceremony at the Russian embassy in October, organized on the occasion of the birthday of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The editor-in-chief of the far-right magazine “Compact”, Juergen Elsaesser, presented there a silver medal with Putin's image and handed it to the Russian ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechayev. While other parties in the Bundestag expressed outrage at the event, the head of the AfD club in Saxony-Anhalt said he saw nothing wrong with it.
AfD politicians wanted to fly to Sochi. The Bundestag refused to issue the pass
In recent weeks, there has also been a lot of news about four AfD politicians, including two members of the Bundestag – Steffen Kotrem and Rainer Rothfuss – and MEP Hans Neuhoff, planning to participate in the BRICS summit in Sochi, scheduled for November 13-17.
A few days ago, a court in Berlin confirmed the Bundestag's decision to refuse to issue a pass to an employee of an AfD deputy. This is about former MP Ulrich Oehme, currently a colleague of Saxony MP Edgar Naujok, who – according to the media – has close ties to the Kremlin.
