Founded 2026

Russophobia

When a state becomes an enemy, how quickly do its people become suspects? From nineteenth-century enemy images to the exclusions of the present, Pomnym follows that transfer of blame.

This is Pomnym's editorial assessment. Sources establish the facts cited; the judgments and questions that follow are ours.

What gets attention

A public debate takes shape through selection as well as accuracy: which events lead, which comparisons are made, and which people remain outside the picture. Our concern is the ease with which criticism of Russia becomes a background assumption about Russians.

Consistent scrutiny matters. A favourable economic comparison does not vindicate every government policy; an unfavourable one does not explain a whole society. The same measure should not become uninteresting merely because it complicates a familiar account.

Russia is not the same question as Russians

The four survey series reviewed in the linked record chiefly ask about the Russian state, its president and its policies. They do not supply a continuous, comparable measure of attitudes toward Russian people. The isolated people-level questions and gaps matter as much as the state-level trend.

Distrust of a government does not tell us how its citizens are treated at work, in a bank or at a university. Nor can it prove an entire population's private motives. Those questions require their own evidence.

Institutions make choices

An account that blames only Berlin or Brussels leaves too much out. Banks, universities, competition organisers and cultural institutions also make decisions. Whether an exclusion was legally required, discretionary or later reversed must be checked case by case.

That objection applies equally to Russian state coverage when it portrays Western populations and institutions as merely following their leaders. The records identify decision-makers, not a single collective mind. Accountability belongs with the actual choice and the authority behind it.

AfD: rapprochement is not a guarantee

AfD's calls for de-escalation should not be mistaken for unconditional solidarity with Russian people. Rapprochement is nevertheless longstanding party policy: its 2016 basic platform proposed partnership with Russia and ending sanctions. Its 2025 election programme called for restored trade and repaired Nord Stream pipelines.

Emphases differ. In his December 1, 2025 answer, Rüdiger Lucassen combined diplomacy with deterrence, condemned Russia's invasion as unlawful and stressed German interests. Neither a platform nor one member's statement establishes every member's motives.

Opposition to confrontation is valuable in its own right, but it is not a guarantee against discrimination or a promise of a natural ally. Judge the party by specific policies and individual conduct. An 'enemy of my enemy' reading is an interpretation, not a measured explanation of the membership.

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Economic costs deserve political weight

The loss of Russian gas imposed real costs on Germany. The Council of Economic Experts documented the 2022 energy shock's effects on household purchasing power and energy-intensive production. That connection is public, not forbidden: ZDF discussed it again in March 2026. Current weakness also has other causes; Ifo's June 2026 forecast identifies weak productivity, demographic constraints and a newer Middle East energy shock.

In July 2022, 58% of respondents to Infratest dimap supported sanctions even if Germany faced energy-supply problems and falling economic output; 33% opposed them. That is evidence of accepting specified costs, not a wish to kill Russians. In September 2026, 13% were satisfied with Merz's work and almost eight in ten judged the economy negatively. Separate answers cannot establish why an individual dislikes him.

The sharper question is whether reporting and political decisions give livelihoods and opportunities for de-escalation sufficient weight. Economic sacrifice should require a clear account of its purpose, effectiveness and alternatives. Criticising the price while exempting the choices that helped produce it from scrutiny is not enough.

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Language is not allegiance

Russian is part of Ukraine's lived history, not simply a language across its border. Lex Fridman's January 2025 interview introduced Russian as Zelensky's primary language for most of his life. Zelensky also starred in the Russian-language comedy Servant of the People.

Today's picture is different from a claim of nationwide Russian dominance. KIIS's May-June 2026 survey recorded home use of mainly or always Ukrainian at 62%, Russian at 14%, and both at 23%. It interviewed 1,000 adult citizens in government-controlled territory, excluding residents of occupied territories and those abroad. These are self-reported home-use figures under wartime conditions, not a census of language ability across all of Ukraine.

Neither language nor cultural background determines political allegiance. Russian-speaking Ukrainians should remain visible as people, not be reduced to symbols claimed by opposing governments. A president's biography cannot stand in for the linguistic history of an entire country.

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Origin as a disqualifier

The editor of this archive remembers a conversation, years before the invasion, with a colleague from the technology industry - green, left-leaning, genuinely curious about how Ethereum worked. The reply to the subject was that the technology was interesting, but that it had been built by a Russian, had he known that. It was not offered as an argument. It was offered as a reason not to look any further, and the looking stopped there.

Taken as a fact about Ethereum, the remark does not hold. Ethereum was conceived by Vitalik Buterin, who was born in Kolomna near Moscow in 1994 and left for Canada at the age of six. It was built by a group conventionally counted as eight co-founders, who were English, American, Canadian, Romanian, Israeli and Dutch as well as Russian-Canadian. Compressing that into one nationality is what the remark did, and the compression was the point of it.

The suspicion did not wait for the war. In mid-January 2022, six weeks before the invasion, Buterin asked his readers for the most unhinged criticisms of himself they had seen. His own father joined in to report one of them: that his son was a KGB operative working for Vladimir Putin, and that the Russian state was therefore behind Ethereum. The family treated it as a joke. It was already in circulation.

What followed shows the same man being told the opposite thing from the other direction. On 24 February 2022 Buterin condemned the invasion in Russian, calling it a crime against the Ukrainian and the Russian people. Three days later Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, wrote that Russians who were now ashamed of being Russian need not worry, because they were not Russian. Buterin answered her with an obscenity. He had been offered the exit from Russian identity by the Russian state's own broadcaster, and he refused it. Four years later, in February 2026, he was still describing himself the same way: born in Russia, but grew up in Canada.

The most consequential version of the same reflex is a job. On Monday 30 September 2024 the software company ABBYY held a meeting its staff could not speak in: invitations to a mandatory town hall had gone out the evening before, chat and microphones were disabled, and the calls ran one after another that afternoon - Limassol first, then Belgrade, then Budapest. The whole thing took about an hour and a half, and access to the corporate network was withdrawn while it was still going on. Several hundred people lost their jobs, most of them relocated out of Russia by ABBYY itself after 2022. Former employees told Mediazona, Forbes and Novaya Gazeta Europe that the invitation lists for those calls held Russian passport holders and almost nobody else. The company tells it differently: Gina Ray, its senior director of corporate marketing, said ABBYY employs people of more than thirty nationalities from thirteen countries, that it had embarked on a path of business transformation and modernisation, and that it had reorganised finance, accounting, go-to-market and research functions that were located in certain regions. It would not say how many people were affected.

What follows is the part this archive cannot leave out. The passport account comes from employees who spoke anonymously and from a post since deleted. Against it, on the record: a recruiter citing an ABBYY manager said the company had cut its development organisation rather than its Russians, and that Russian citizens in other departments stayed; a former executive told Forbes the reason was economic and not political; a Belarusian, a Latvian and staff from France were dismissed too, while some Russian passport holders kept their jobs; and Meduza pointed out that development at ABBYY had always been Russian-speaking, so cutting it would have looked like cutting Russians whatever the reason. The Bell concluded that dismissal by nationality seemed unlikely. Two months before the calls, ABBYY had announced on its own site a research centre in Bengaluru, describing it as complementing a footprint it listed as Hungary, Serbia, Cyprus and the United States. Collective complaints went to the labour ministries of Hungary, Cyprus, Serbia and Germany, and when Novaya Gazeta Europe published in October 2024 not one of them had been considered. That is where it rests, and on a narrow base: the account comes from four Russian exile outlets reporting anonymous former employees within about two days, and no journalist, regulator or union in Cyprus, Serbia or Hungary appears to have examined it since. Several hundred people were told their roles were eliminated, in a meeting where they could not ask why, and no decision on any of those complaints has been located since, so whether the passport mattered has never been established either way.

One end of this is a Western reflex that treats Russian origin as a reason to stop reading. The other is a Russian state that treats dissent as forfeiture of Russian identity. Neither asked what the person had done or thought; both read the answer off where he was born. A single remembered conversation proves nothing about how common the first reflex is, and this archive does not claim otherwise - the dated records it links do that work instead.

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What a contemporary witness saw

Every country in this archive forbids discrimination and keeps a body to enforce the prohibition. The records show what those bodies did when Russians came to them. Germany's federal anti-discrimination agency reached no conclusion on the banks, because nationality is not a protected characteristic under the General Equal Treatment Act at all. The Dutch equality body examined four complaints against ING, found that the bank had made a direct distinction on grounds of nationality, and held that it was not a prohibited one. The Czech ombudsman found that universities had restricted access to education by nationality and could record fault only against a regulator, because his anti-discrimination jurisdiction does not reach the nationality of non-EU citizens. The German government counted 196 people of Russian or Belarusian origin who came for advice, and recorded the outcome of none of them. The protection exists. It was drafted so that this case falls outside it.

That is the law, and it is checkable. What follows is neither law nor finding. It is what one contemporary witness saw, set down here because this archive exists to hold the contemporaneous account and not only the paperwork that account produced.

A contemporary witness records this. The hostility did not come from where the political map says it should. It came most readily from liberals - from people whose politics is built on identity and injury, who had spent years learning to watch their language, who would not let a joke about any other nationality pass and corrected a word about any other group without being asked. With Russians none of it applied. The same person who would not generalise about anyone generalised freely. The same person who counted a slight against any other origin as harm counted contempt for Russians as a position worth holding. On that account it is the only form of racism that costs nothing to express, and the only one this witness has seen treated as a credential rather than a fault.

What the witness describes has a name, and it is the form this archive documents almost to the exclusion of everything else: socio-economic marginalisation. Not assault, but the steady, lawful, always deniable removal of people from the ordinary means of earning a living and taking part. An account capped or closed. A university place refused. A competition entry withdrawn. A residence permit not renewed. A post eliminated in a meeting where nobody could ask why. Each decision is defensible on its own, each has a form of words ready for it, and not one of them is a crime. Taken together they are the mechanism by which a person of Russian origin in the West is moved to the edge of economic and social life without anyone raising a hand or breaking a law. That is a major form of Russophobia in the West, and it is the one that leaves the most paper behind and attracts the least attention. Physical assault is a different phenomenon with a different profile, and it is counted in a Record of its own.

This archive marks what the recollection is and is not. It is one life in one country, and it establishes nothing about what liberals in general believe; no survey here measures it, because, as the record on thirty years of German polling shows, almost nobody asked. What the documented material establishes is narrower and harder to answer - that the rule against judging a person by where they are from was written, is enforced, and in this one case was found not to apply.

One such recollection is already here. The conversation recorded above under Origin as a disqualifier - a colleague, green and left-leaning, who found Ethereum interesting until he heard that a Russian had built it - is the same observation in miniature. It stays where it is because the documented material around it does the work a recollection cannot do for itself.

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The uniform is not enough

All Germans are equal, but some Germans are more equal than others. The Orwell paraphrase is deliberate. The people in the Lithuania report are already serving in the Bundeswehr. According to that reporting, several soldiers with family ties to Russia or Belarus may remain in uniform in Germany, yet have been refused the Lithuania posting after security checks.

Pomnym documents the barriers a Russian connection can place across ordinary life: an account, a university place, a livelihood. Here the question reaches the state's own uniform. A restricted posting does not by itself prove Russophobia. It demands scrutiny of the point at which assessing a person's vulnerability becomes judging their belonging.

This did not begin with Lithuania. In Julia Weigelt's November 2025 JS report, Tatjana, a Bundeswehr soldier with German and Russian citizenship, described being questioned by MAD about her attitude to Russia's invasion after years of service. She rejected the prospect of becoming a second-class soldier because of her Russian roots. That is her account, not testimony from the unnamed Lithuania applicants. A MAD spokesperson confirmed in the same report that checks had tightened at the end of 2022.

There is a real security question. Foreign intelligence services can threaten relatives, and loyalty does not make a soldier immune to coercion. That requires examining actual exposure, the proposed duties and possible safeguards. It does not turn a family connection into proof of allegiance to a foreign state. Permission to serve in Germany is no automatic entitlement to every posting; neither is Russian ancestry an answer to an individual's case.

If a person's family history is used to decide what they must believe, our editorial charge is Gesinnungssäuberung - an ideological purge. That would assign political beliefs by biography. This is an editorial judgment, not a finding about the soldiers or proof that their opinions caused the reported refusals. The danger is citizenship in two grades: equal on paper, but with one group repeatedly required to establish that it belongs.

Article 3 of the Basic Law protects against disadvantage because of descent and origin. Article 33 promises Germans equal access to public office according to aptitude, qualifications and achievement. An institution invoking "our democracy" must be able to justify its treatment of the individual and submit that decision to effective review. Citizenship must not end where the family tree begins.

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The longer history

1800-1914: an enemy image before the Soviet Union

Hostility towards Russia did not begin with communism. Historian Dietrich Geyer traces German liberal and democratic images of Russian despotism and barbarism in the nineteenth century, alongside conservative admiration for the tsarist order. Criticism of a political system could become a judgment on a whole people.

Raymond T. McNally locates an early French anti-Russian campaign in the years 1812-1830. Britain and France later fought Russia in the Crimean War, from 1854 to 1856. These histories differ; war alone does not prove hatred of a people. Together they show that the repertoire of Russian backwardness and danger predates the regimes later used to explain it.

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1914-1945: ideology, racial hierarchy and annihilation

Russia entered the First World War as an ally of Britain and France. After 1917, fear of Bolshevism gave older antagonisms a new ideological language, as historian Jan Kusber describes. The changing alliances matter: neither Western Europe nor its view of Russia was a single, permanent bloc.

The German war against the Soviet Union from 1941 was a war of annihilation. The Museum Berlin-Karlshorst documents its ideological foundations and crimes against prisoners of war and civilians. Its victims included many Soviet peoples, not Russians alone. This is a distinct historical catastrophe, not a synonym for present-day sanctions or rhetoric. It shows the extreme consequences of treating populations as inherently inferior.

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1945-1989: confrontation was not the only possible policy

The Cold War did not make rapprochement impossible. West Germany's Ostpolitik brought negotiations with the Soviet Union and Poland; the Moscow Treaty was signed on 12 August 1970. The Haus der Geschichte records the fierce domestic opposition to this change, as well as its role in easing tensions.

For Pomnym, that reversal matters as much as the confrontation. A political enemy image can become entrenched, but it can also lose its grip. Criticism of Soviet rule, security conflict and prejudice against Russians must be examined separately. Describing them all as the same hostility would erase both the differences and the choices that made dialogue possible.

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1990-2013: the promise of a shared Europe

The 1990 Charter of Paris declared an end to European confrontation and committed its signatories, including the Soviet Union, to cooperation and equal rights. Russia joined the Council of Europe on 28 February 1996. These were concrete institutional openings, not merely warmer language.

They rule out a simple story of hostility rising without interruption. Political inclusion also did not guarantee that social prejudice had disappeared. The surveys collected in our Records require a further distinction: trust in Russia as a state, attitudes towards its government and attitudes towards Russian people answer different questions. A falling approval rating for a government cannot be relabelled as a measured hatred of its citizens.

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2014-2021: political rupture and the language of insignificance

In 2014 the EU introduced sectoral economic sanctions in response to Russia's actions in Ukraine. Their stated political grounds belong in the record. So does the rhetoric around them: the descriptions of Russia as a regional power or a gas station diminished an entire country to a strategic caricature.

The Russophrenia chapter below examines how claims of Russian weakness coexist with warnings of overwhelming Russian danger. Pomnym reads that contradiction as part of the public climate in which collective suspicion becomes easier to justify. It is an editorial interpretation; neither sanctions nor a hostile description of a state automatically establish discrimination against an individual.

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Since 2022: when nationality reaches everyday life

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine intensified the confrontation. The EU Fundamental Rights Agency subsequently recorded reports of hostility and discrimination against Russians and Russian speakers, while also warning about fabricated incidents and gaps in the data. Its evidence supports documented cases; it does not supply a reliable Europe-wide curve of continuously rising prejudice.

The Records below follow the consequences into banking, services, sport and military careers. Each has its own evidence and limits. Pomnym's central question remains the same: when does responsibility for a government's actions become a burden placed on a surname, a passport, a language or a family history? That shift, wherever the evidence establishes it, is the thread connecting this history to the present.

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Russophrenia

A country too broken to matter and too dangerous to contain. Both claims, from the same governments, in the same years.

A name for the condition

In June 2015 the Irish journalist Bryan MacDonald gave the pattern a name: Russophrenia, "a condition where the sufferer believes Russia is both about to collapse, and take over the world". He wrote it for RT, which is funded by the Russian state and has been barred from broadcast in the European Union since March 2022. The word arrives with an interest of its own, and naming that interest is the price of using it at all.

The interest does not dispose of the observation. Whether two claims can both be true is a question about the claims, not about who noticed them. What follows is drawn entirely from the Western record: dated statements by named officials, set against the outcomes their own institutions later measured.

Any single pairing can be explained away. A forecast can miss. A threat assessment is supposed to change when the evidence changes. What resists explanation is the direction of the error, which runs the same way every time. Russia is weak when weakness justifies pressure, and strong when strength justifies spending.

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The same man, ten years apart

On 25 March 2014, in The Hague, Barack Obama called Russia "a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors - not out of strength, but out of weakness". He said it standing beside the Dutch prime minister co-hosting the summit: Mark Rutte.

On 12 December 2024 Rutte was Secretary General of NATO. "Russia is preparing for long-term confrontation," he told an audience in Brussels. "With Ukraine. And with us." Then: "We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years." A year later he went further, describing NATO allies as Russia's next target.

One biography holds both halves. In 2014 Russia threatening its neighbours was proof of weakness; by 2024 the same behaviour was proof of a danger the alliance was unready for. Neither statement is dishonest on its own. Together they describe two different countries, and no one was required to say which one had changed.

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Ruin forecast, growth delivered

On 25 February 2022 the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said of the second sanctions package: "Das wird Russland ruinieren" - this will ruin Russia. On 1 March the French finance minister Bruno Le Maire said France would provoke the collapse of the Russian economy. On 26 March, in Warsaw, Joe Biden said the Russian economy was "on track to be cut in half" and would soon not rank among the world's top twenty.

The forecasts were specific enough to check. In April 2022 the International Monetary Fund projected Russian output would fall 8.5 per cent that year; the World Bank projected 11.2 per cent. The outturn was a contraction of roughly 1.4 per cent, followed by growth of about 4.1 per cent in 2023 and again in 2024.

Le Maire did retract something that week, and it was not the forecast: he withdrew the word "war" as inappropriate to a strategy of de-escalation. The prediction of collapse stood. The honest close is that the growth has not lasted either - the same IMF series puts Russia near one per cent a year from 2025 to 2027. Sanctions did not do nothing. They did not do what was announced, and the announcement was never revisited by the people who made it.

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The economy the size of Spain

"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country," John McCain said in March 2014. In January 2015 Obama told Congress that Russia stood "isolated with its economy in tatters". In March 2018 Wolfgang Ischinger, then chairman of the Munich Security Conference, wrote that the Russian economy was "smaller than that of Italy, and a bit larger than that of Spain" - a "well known fact, zero surprise".

The World Bank's International Comparison Program placed Russia fourth in the world for 2021 at 5.7 trillion international dollars, ahead of Japan at 5.6 and Germany at 5.2. Two things must be said plainly, because a page objecting to selective framing cannot practise it. The crossover is dated 2021, before the full-scale invasion, so it is not a feat performed under sanctions. And the 2021 round linked Russia through the Commonwealth of Independent States comparison where the 2017 round linked it through the OECD, so part of the movement is measurement rather than growth.

The comparison with Spain was also arithmetically correct on the measure it used, and Germany's economy remains more than twice Russia's in nominal terms. The complaint is not that the figures were wrong. It is that one metric was offered as the whole truth while it flattered the conclusion, and its companion went unmentioned when it stopped doing so. "In decline for decades" is likewise more than the record carries: the dismissals run from 2014, not from the 1990s.

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Tanks, and the talk around them

Anton Hofreiter, chairing the Bundestag's Europe committee, put the choice as either NATO membership for Ukraine or 3,200 Leopard tanks. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, then chairing the defence committee, told the Berliner Zeitung in February 2023 that Germany had looked at the light and refused to see the shadow: a hundred kilometres east of Moscow, she said, no ballet dances. In February 2024 Roderich Kiesewetter, a retired Bundeswehr colonel, called for carrying the war into Russia - ministries and command posts, not only refineries.

In January 2023 Baerbock told the Council of Europe that "we are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other". The context is the point, and it cuts against the easy reading: she was arguing against European infighting over tank deliveries, and she addressed the phrasing afterwards. Quoting it as a boast would be precisely the decontextualisation this page objects to. It is better read as what happens to language under pressure.

One sentence is missing from this record, and it is the one most often attributed to it. No German statement that a single Leopard could roll to Moscow can be sourced - not in German, English or Russian. The only Leopards in Moscow are the captured ones displayed in Victory Park. The real rhetoric is quotable enough without an invented line, and the invented line would discredit every quotable one beside it.

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The superpower with a hundred-thousand-dollar budget

On 6 September 2017 Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos disclosed "approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017 - associated with roughly 3,000 ads", from accounts the company believed were operated from Russia. The same disclosure added that "the vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn't specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate".

Under oath on 1 November 2017, Facebook's general counsel Colin Stretch supplied the rest. A quarter of the ads were never shown to anyone at all. Fifty-six per cent of impressions landed after election day. For half the ads, less than three dollars was spent. Asked in the same hearing what the Clinton and Trump campaigns had spent on Facebook, he answered: approximately 81 million dollars.

That is the scale at which an adversary is said to have outperformed an industry. If a hundred thousand dollars of largely undisplayed, largely non-electoral, largely post-election advertising can decide a presidency, then the eighty-one million spent against it bought nothing, and every commercial claim made by the platform that sold both is false. The professionals cannot be that good and that helpless at the same time.

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The three days nobody said

"Russia thought it would take Kyiv in three days" is among the most repeated sentences of the war, and its origin is traceable. On 5 February 2022 Fox News reported that General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, "told lawmakers during closed-door briefings on Feb. 2 and 3 that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine could result in the fall of Kyiv within 72-hours".

Three precisions matter. It is not a Milley quotation but a report of a classified briefing, sourced to congressional staff. The figure is seventy-two hours, not three days. And it describes how fast an American assessment thought a capital might fall, not what Russia expected to achieve - the same briefing forecast some nineteen thousand military deaths, which is nobody's idea of a walkover. No statement by any Russian official claiming a three-day war has been found, in English or in Russian.

The claim here stops where the evidence does. Russia did plan a short campaign: the Royal United Services Institute, working from captured Russian planning documents including a tank army's synchronisation matrix taken near Kyiv, describes a ten-day plan premised on seizing the capital quickly. The narrow point is enough. An American intelligence estimate was laundered into a Russian boast, and the boast is now quoted back to Russians as evidence of their own stupidity.

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Disposable agents

Since 2025 the German security services have described a new Russian method: Low-Level-Agenten, recruited over social media, paid a few hundred euros, often petty criminals, usually unaware who is directing them. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution notes in its own footnote that the vivid synonyms - Wegwerf-Agenten, disposable agents, and Taschengeld-Agenten, pocket-money agents - come from the press rather than from the service. On 2 September 2025 four federal agencies launched a public campaign built on one of them: do not become a disposable agent.

The prosecutions behind it are real. Two German-Russian dual nationals stood trial in Munich over planned attacks on military and logistics targets, and three Ukrainian nationals were arrested in May 2025 over parcels sent to map freight routes. Courts are the right place for these questions, and those cases are not disputed here.

What is disputed is the distance between the cases and the campaign. The service's April 2025 public analysis names no case at all, and its May 2025 publication argues almost entirely by category, illustrated by a single incident. A threat narrative that asserts considerably more than it demonstrates is not a fabrication. It is something more useful than a fabrication: an accusation that cannot be checked, about people who need not be identified, attached to a nationality that always can be.

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The strongest case against this page

The best objection is not that the quotations are wrong. It is that the loudest warnings do not come from the people closest to the risk. On 29 December 2024 Kaupo Rosin, director general of Estonia's Foreign Intelligence Service, said that Russia "currently has no intention of attacking any of the Baltic states or NATO more broadly". Estonia shares a border with Russia. That refutes any suggestion that every Western service expects an attack - and it is the stronger version of the argument made here, not a concession against it.

Other concessions are owed. Governments are not single minds, and a finance ministry in 2022 and a defence ministry in 2024 can be wrong in opposite directions without conspiring; Boris Pistorius and Bruno Kahl were reporting assessments, not writing slogans. Threat estimates are supposed to move. RT, which supplied the name, has an obvious interest in the diagnosis. And the same criticism applies to Russian state coverage of Western publics, which this archive says elsewhere and repeats here.

None of that is the point being made. Incoherence in coverage proves nothing about anyone's motives, and establishes nothing on its own about how Russians are treated. What it does is lower the price of the treatment. A country that is contemptible and terrifying at once is a country whose people can be refused a bank account, a visa or a place in a competition without anyone having to say which of the two they are being punished for. The Records are where that price is written down.

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Ask which Russia is meant

When the next claim about Russia arrives, ask which of the two Russias it needs: the one too poor to replace its own missiles, or the one rich enough to buy an election. Most claims quietly need both, and almost none are ever asked to choose.

Look at the decision

A government's policy, an institution's decision and a person's conduct are different things. Changing a government will not necessarily change every practice. The useful question is concrete: who made the decision, whom did it affect, and what would change it?

Records / Evidence / Act