Tino Chrupalla showed up for a reception at the Russian Embassy in Berlin on May 9 with a special gift. On the day of commemoration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, the AfD chairman and master painter from Saxony presented the Russian ambassador with a cup of Prussian eagle. Possibly at the suggestion of the AfD honorary chairman and historian Alexander Gauland, who accompanied Chrupalla.
As early as 2013, when the party was founded, which was still national-conservative and economically liberal at the time, but is now largely right-wing extremist, Gauland had invoked proximity to Putin's Russia with reference to Bismarck's successful European alliance policy of the 19th century. The former CDU politician received his first name from his father out of reverence for Tsar Alexander I. The Russian ruler and autocrat supported the wars of liberation against Napoleon in a military alliance with Prussia concluded in 1813.
Today, Chrupalla, Gauland and other AfD leaders support the Russia of post-Soviet Tsar Vladimir Putin through the flower in his war of aggression against Ukraine. At the same time, they portray the AfD as a neutral "peace party" with an anti-Western orientation. Enemy number one is Biden's liberal America, which supports Ukraine in its defensive struggle like no other state.
Dispute within the AfD parliamentary group
Both AfD politicians do not name Russia as an aggressor or even condemn it for the brutal attack on a sovereign neighboring country. They blame NATO, and above all the US, for the war because they have violated Russia's legitimate security interests since the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. A military threat from nuclear-armed Russia and its plans to restore its former empire beyond Ukraine are simply ignored or denied. A story that Sahra Wagenknecht also spreads on the left. A narrative that coincides with Moscow's propaganda of Russia as the real victim of Western aggression.
But her assessment of the Ukraine war led to a dispute within the AfD parliamentary group even before the embassy visit. There, almost unnoticed by the public, a terse statement found the majority, in which arms deliveries to Kiev, but at least the "uncritical adoption of Russian positions" are rejected. It is above all members of parliament who see the AfD as a party of soldiers and who therefore also welcome a strengthening of the Bundeswehr. But in the external perception of the AfD and also in the right-wing state associations of Saxony and Thuringia, those who sought proximity to Putin's regime in the first phase of Russia's aggression against Ukraine from 2014 onwards predominate.
Russia as a "liberator"
It is such forces that the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, means when he says that the AfD is an important actor in the dissemination of Russian propaganda. The Kremlin can basically save itself the trouble and money of telling its fairy tale of a defensive war against the threat from the West through its own propaganda media such as "Russia Today" in Germany. This business is then done by politicians of the AfD with a large media reach, some of whom sang Putin's song even before the outbreak of the war, for example through Moscow-financed visits to annexed Crimea. And smash it enthusiastically even after the invasion of Ukraine.
On Russian state television, for example, the Brandenburg AfD member of the Bundestag Steffen Kotré was connected to the propaganda show of presenter Vladimir Solovyov, a warmonger and Putin admirer. There, Kotré was allowed to stir up sentiment against the German government and German media, which see Russia as an enemy.
In the AfD, many are also ideologically attracted to Putin's Russia and the dictatorship that rules there. The Thuringian AfD leader Björn Höcke, for example, raves about the ideal Russian world and its traditional values. If he had to choose between the "rainbow empire and the globalist West" or the "traditional East", he would choose the "East".
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, an AfD member of the state parliament from Saxony-Anhalt, puts it even more clearly. He sees Russia as a "liberator" from the United States, which wants to "reshape us" from "multiculturalism to genderism in its image." A liberator to whom Gauland and Chrupalla pay homage with their respects.