The vote and the stakes
On 6 September 2026 the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt goes to the polls, with the hard-right Alternative fur Deutschland leading comfortably. INSA polling has put the AfD at around 42 per cent, far ahead of the Christian Democrats who currently lead the state government. Two more regional votes follow on 20 September, in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. For an influence operation, an eastern state election with a strong pro-Russian bloc is an inviting target, and the campaign now under way treats it as one.
Operation Matryoshka
The activity has been attributed to Operation Matryoshka, also tracked as Operation Overload, a long-running Russian information operation known for a distinctive move: impersonating trusted media brands. Rather than build fake outlets from scratch, Matryoshka fakes the mastheads and on-screen graphics of real, respected broadcasters and newspapers, then attaches fabricated stories to them. The point is to borrow credibility that took the BBC or ARD decades to earn and spend it in a single misleading clip.
What the researchers found
Investigators tracking the current wave logged, in one July phase alone, at least 49 fake videos, 12 falsified newspaper covers and one fabricated image, according to reporting compiled by EU DisinfoLab and other monitors of the campaign. The clips, mostly in English and seeded across X, Bluesky and TikTok, carried the logos of outlets including the BBC and Germany’s public broadcaster ARD, and used AI-generated audio and captions to put invented accusations into the mouths of real institutions.
The open-source collective Antibot4Navalny, which has tracked Matryoshka’s posting patterns for years, was among the first to flag the surge. Julia Smirnova, an analyst at Berlin’s Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, has described the operation as a serious attempt to pollute the information space around the vote, even where individual clips reach only modest audiences.
The one bloc left untouched
The targeting tells its own story. The fabricated material has gone after the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left, the parties that make up or flank the governing mainstream, while leaving the AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, the two parties most sympathetic to Moscow, conspicuously alone. That asymmetry is the clearest signal of intent. This is not indiscriminate noise. It is a campaign shaped to depress support for Ukraine’s backers and lift the parties that would cut Kyiv loose.
Berlin’s response and the Kremlin’s denial
Germany has begun to organise against this kind of interference. In June 2026 the interior ministry stood up a Joint Centre for Countering Hybrid Threats, known as GAZ Hybrid, to coordinate the federal response. Even so, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has acknowledged that the government is monitoring the Matryoshka campaign rather than actively taking the videos down, and German security sources have called the operation serious while noting its limited initial reach. The FBI has reportedly linked the wider Matryoshka effort to the Social Design Agency, the Moscow marketing firm at the centre of several recent Russian influence disclosures. Moscow rejects all of it. The Russian embassy has dismissed the accusations as part of what it calls anti-Russian hysteria.
Outcome and what changed
The election has not yet happened, so the honest verdict on impact is that it is not yet in. What has changed is the German posture. A year ago the standard response to a fake-BBC clip was a quiet debunk. Now there is a dedicated hybrid-threats centre, public naming of the operation before the vote, and platform takedowns of at least some of the material.
The gap that remains is enforcement speed. Monitoring without removal leaves the fabricated clips live during exactly the window when they can do the most damage, and researchers warn that the two further votes on 20 September will test whether Berlin can move from watching to acting. The template, real logos wrapped around invented claims, is cheap to produce and easy to repeat. The countermeasure that works is pre-emptive: tell voters the fakes are coming, and show them what the impersonation looks like, before the clip lands in their feed.
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