In the first weeks after the invasion, businesses and institutions in Germany were attacked for their connection to Russia. The incidents are dated and documented. So is the fact that the attacks were exaggerated and partly invented for propaganda.
Within a fortnight of the invasion of Ukraine, businesses and institutions in Germany were attacked because of their connection to Russia. On 1 March 2022 a restaurant in Baden-Württemberg declared that visitors holding Russian passports were unwelcome. On 3 March the window of a Russian supermarket in Oberhausen was smashed and white paint sprayed on its façade. On 4 March a doctor at the LMU Klinikum in Munich announced that he would not treat Russian patients, and a Georgian-Armenian restaurant in Bremen was attacked in its Google reviews. On 5 March a restaurant in Berlin-Mitte received death threats: the callers said they would burn it down.
On 11 March 2022 the German-Russian Lomonossow school in Berlin-Marzahn was set on fire. On 16 March glass bottles were thrown at the Russian Orthodox church in Berlin-Charlottenburg, damaging three windows. On 15 March a schoolchild in Hövelhof was verbally attacked by classmates with ethnic slurs, and on 19 March two criminal complaints were filed in Rostock over altercations, insults and threats.
The pattern reached beyond the shopfront. On 8 March 2022 bank accounts belonging to Russian passport holders were frozen without warning. By 11 March the Berlin police had registered about 100 attacks on people from the post-Soviet region in that city alone - damage to property, threats and insults, directed at buildings, Russian organisations, media and private individuals. By mid-April the Bundeskriminalamt had counted more than 1,700 war-related offences nationwide, about 200 a week, a figure it gave to Human Rights Watch along with the categories: insults, threats, physical assault and property damage.
Human Rights Watch recorded the same incidents in June 2022 and added others: desecrated Soviet memorials, concentration-camp plaques daubed with Nazi symbols, and the bullying of Russian-speaking children in schools. It also recorded one account in detail. A Russian woman it calls Anna, forty years old and seventeen years resident in Germany, was threatened in a Berlin park in late April 2022 while speaking Russian.
The sources that document these attacks also document their exaggeration, and they do so in the same breath. In their 2023 expertise for Mediendienst Integration, Jannis Panagiotidis and Hans-Christian Petersen put it in one sentence: hostilities against Russian-speaking people in Germany are real, but were also instrumentalised. In March 2022 the pro-Russian influencer Alina Lipp spread a video claiming that a sixteen-year-old Russian-German had been beaten to death by a mob of Ukrainian refugees in Euskirchen. It went viral and was shown to be false; Correctiv published its account on 8 April 2022.
The Federal Government rejects the word usually attached to these events. In its answer of 9 July 2026 it states that the Russian leadership regularly instrumentalises the Federal Government's own statements for propaganda and disinformation campaigns, repeatedly raising the unfounded accusation of supposed "Russophobie", and that the Federal Government does not adopt the term and expressly rejects such accusations.
The credible German sources on these incidents do not reach for the 1933 boycott of Jewish shops to describe them. They place them in a different tradition, which they name: antislawischer Rassismus, the racism directed at Slavs that runs through Generalplan Ost, the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war and the forced labour of the Ostarbeiter. Panagiotidis and Petersen add a point that complicates the label itself: only about a third of the roughly four million post-Soviet migrants in Germany came from the Russian Federation, and a further third from Kazakhstan, so "Russian" is in large part an ascription by others.
Sources
- Belltower.News (Amadeu Antonio Stiftung), Anton Livshits: Antislawischer Rassismus - Anfeindungen gegen Menschen und Läden mit Bezug zum postsowjetischen Raum, 15 March 2022
- Human Rights Watch: Ukraine-Krieg führt zu Hassverbrechen in Deutschland, 1 June 2022
- Mediendienst Integration, Expertise von Jannis Panagiotidis und Hans-Christian Petersen: Antiosteuropäischer und antislawischer Rassismus, 5 May 2023
- Correctiv, Faktencheck: Alina Lipp - wie eine 28-Jährige zum Sprachrohr russischer Propaganda wurde, 8 April 2022
- Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 21/7085 (answer of the Federal Government), 9 July 2026
Where it stands
The individual incidents are reported by named, non-Russian sources - an anti-racism foundation, an international human rights organisation, and two academic researchers - and most rest on a single report each. The police and BKA figures are counts of registered reports, not of convictions or established findings, and the BKA total covers all war-related offences rather than offences against Russians specifically. No outcome is recorded here for any individual case, and none of the sources states that any perpetrator was identified. Reporting on named Berlin restaurants was located but could not be read directly and is therefore not reproduced. Every source that documents these attacks also documents that they were instrumentalised, and this entry carries that with the same prominence the sources give it. The Belltower.News chronicle is dated 15 March 2022 but lists incidents of 16 and 19 March, so it was evidently extended after publication without a correction notice. The Mediendienst Integration expertise carries only "Mai 2023"; the day used here is the date its file was published on the Mediendienst server, two days after the document itself was created.