a Better Bubble™
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This story was co-published with The New Yorker and is exempt from our Creative Commons license until Sept. 11, 2022.
Last October, I sat in the office of Klaus Emmerich, the chief union representative at the Garzweiler brown-coal mine in western Germany, as he shared his misgivings about the country’s celebrated plan to stop burning coal. Germany’s build-up of renewable energy was lagging and, given that coal accounts for more than a quarter of its total electricity supply, that meant it would have to rely on another energy source for the time being: natural gas, which came mostly from Russia. “We’re giving ourselves over to the Russians,” Emmerich told me. “I have a bad feeling about it.”
Five months later, Emmerich’s premonitions have borne out, powerfully. President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed civilian and military carnage, ravaged cities and sent some two million people fleeing the country. As its effects have rippled across Europe and the world, one consequence has gone underexamined: The invasion has upended the political and economic policies of Germany, where the government has reconsidered its long-planned energy transition; undone a congenial political stance toward Russia that lasted for half a century; and reversed a policy of military minimalism that dates to the end of the Second World War. In many ways, Germany has rethought its place in the world — all in two weeks.
At the heart of the shift is Germany’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels, which until recently was not seen as problematic by German leaders. Quite the opposite: It was part of a deliberate, decadeslong effort by Germany to maintain comity with the huge, nuclear-armed neighbor with whom it fought in two bloody 20th century wars. Germany chose its dependence on Russia because it saw the economic links created by fuel imports — physical links, in the form of pipelines through Eastern Europe and under the Baltic Sea — as integral to keeping peace and integrating Russia into the rest of Europe.
On Feb. 22, Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced a curtailment to that dependence on Russian energy. The country was halting Nord Stream 2, a new gas pipeline from Russia that would be capable of providing Europe with 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year at a time when the rest of the Continent’s gas production is declining. Not only would this leave Germany without a crucial source for its energy supply, it was an admission that the strategy of “Ostpolitik” — accommodation with Russia — that Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party had embraced, at least in spirit, for more than 50 years, was a failure.
On Feb. 27, Scholz made an even more stunning declaration. After having already decided to send heavy weaponry to Ukraine, Germany would vastly increase its defense spending — making it, by one estimate, the third-largest military spender in the world, after the U.S. and China — and shift its entire posture toward military engagement. “President Putin created a new reality with his invasion of Ukraine,” Scholz said. “This new reality requires a clear response. We have given it.”
The following day, Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the broadcaster ARD that Germany would now “get one of the most capable, most powerful armies in Europe, one of the best-equipped armies in Europe in the course of this decade.” More than 75 years after the Nazis were vanquished, Germany would allow itself to think and act as a regional power again, complete with pride in its military capability. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a senior member of the historically pacifist-inclined Green Party, said, “If our world is different, then our politics must also be different.” It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this shift, which has left many Germans in shock. “I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it in my political life,” Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, the vice president of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund think tank and a former senior government adviser, told me. “It’s staggering.”
Ostpolitik, or “eastern policy,” dates back to Willy Brandt, who led the Social Democrats (known by their German acronym, the SPD) into power in West Germany in 1969. His embrace of detente and diplomatic outreach to East Germany and the Soviet Union was born of a combination of pragmatism in the face of a nuclear-armed threat, guilt over the Nazis’ unfathomable destruction on the Eastern Front and a desire to show at least some independence from the country’s chief ally and protector, the United States.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unraveling of the Soviet Union, the policy was widely judged a rousing success, credited by many Germans with having helped bring about the end of the Cold War. “Germans thought that because the Wall came down peacefully, that Ostpolitik was right,” Kristine Berzina, also with the German Marshall Fund, told me. “Their lived experience was that those relations led to the right outcome, and that meant that making sure that the gas keeps flowing was paramount not only for the German economy but that it was the right strategic decision.” To Berzina and others, though, this was an inaccurate and fateful misremembering of Ostpolitik and an overstatement of its role in the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The policy depended both on diplomacy and military strength, according to Jan Behrends, a loyal SPD member who has served on the party’s historical commission. In Behrends’s view, Brandt was no “hippie peacenik”; he was a Cold Warrior who had, in the late 1940s, lived through the Soviet blockade of Berlin. In 1970, when Brandt paid his first state visit to Moscow, West Germany was spending more than 3% of its GDP on the military and had half a million people under arms. “They took him seriously because Brezhnev looked at him and saw that he was head of the most important fighting force in Western Europe,” Behrends, a historian at the European University Viadrina, in eastern Germany, said.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Germany kept up with Ostpolitik, and the country’s military spending slipped below 1.5% of GDP, even as signs mounted that Russia was on an alarming trajectory under Putin, who, in the 1990s, levelled Grozny, in Chechnya, and presided over a regime that saw disturbing numbers of dissidents persecuted and journalists murdered. Germany further expanded its energy ties with Russia. Angela Merkel, whose center-right Christian Democrats won the 2005 election and led a coalition government with the SPD, agreed to carry on with the construction of the first Nord Stream. The SPD chancellor she unseated, Gerhard Schröder, became chairman of the subsidiary overseeing construction of the pipeline, in which Russia’s Gazprom held a 51% stake.
As chancellor, Merkel defended the country’s investment in Russian energy even as more ominous signs emerged: Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference decrying the expansion of NATO, Russia’s bombardment of Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea and fueling of the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, the murder of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow. (One disturbing episode even occurred inside Germany. In 2019, a Georgian citizen was killed by a bike-riding assassin, alleged to be a former colonel in the Russian intelligence service, in broad daylight in a park in Berlin.)
Yet Germany’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels only increased. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Merkel committed to closing all of Germany’s nuclear plants in a little more than a decade. At the time, nuclear energy was providing nearly a quarter of the country’s electricity. “When we closed down nuclear, they must have drunk champagne in the Kremlin,” Behrends said. “That’s when we gave up our energy sovereignty.”
Behrends doesn’t just blame Merkel. In 2014 and 2015, the U.S. essentially deputized the German chancellor to handle its Russia policy during negotiations in Minsk to end the fighting in the Donbas region. (Merkel grew up in East Germany, where Putin worked for the KGB, and speaks Russian. Among journalists, she was known as the “Putin whisperer.”) “Why did they outsource their Russia policy to Merkel and trust her so much?” Behrends asked. “If the U.S. had sat at the table, they would have carried much more weight, but they weren’t there.”
In hindsight, Germany’s complacency toward Putin’s abuses and consolidation of power looks feckless. But there was little public appetite in Germany for confrontation. Behrends described Merkel’s soft stance as a form of “silent populism.” She sensed that the Germans, basking in peace and prosperity, would not support upending the status quo. “She was popular with Germans because she didn’t disturb their need for Bequemlichkeit, their comfort zone,” he told me.
Looming above all, of course, was the boundless shame of the Third Reich, which left many Germans intent on moral repentance. Within the country, there has long been a divide over what this repentance should entail, roughly aligned in two camps: those who believe Germany should never permit itself to return to totalitarianism (“never again dictatorship” or “never again Auschwitz”), and those who believe Germany should never engage in any war, full stop. With a few exceptions, such as Germany’s limited participation in NATO’s operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the “never again war” camp has held sway.
Germany was further restrained by a regional political dynamic that came into play post-reunification. Former East Germans, who had endured the Red Army’s depredations at the end of the Second World War in ways that the rest of the country had not, were deeply wary of antagonizing Russia. Some also felt betrayed by western Germany for having abandoned its promises of vast economic aid in the east following reunification, which created some sympathy for Putin’s claims to having been cheated by the West.
Olaf Scholz is an unlikely figure to lead Germany’s abrupt break with its postwar maxim, “Es gibt keine militärische Lösung” — “there is no military solution.” This past summer, when I saw him speak at a campaign rally in Berlin, he struck me as a politician in the mold of an old-fashioned Midwestern Democrat, like Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown: progressive but measured, comfortable in his own skin, self-effacing, motivated above all by domestic concerns. (Like Brown, Scholz spoke often of restoring “respect” to the non-college-educated workers who had been drifting away from his party.) There was barely any mention of Russia, or foreign policy in general, during the campaign’s televised debates.
Scholz assumed the chancellorship in December, and his allies sent more weapons to Ukraine. Germany was ridiculed for promising only helmets. As the U.S. prepared sanctions against Russia, Germany equivocated on the fate of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during their talks in the Kremlin on Feb. 15 (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)On Feb. 15, Scholz visited Putin at the Kremlin. The experience of listening “to Putin unplugged,” for hours likely helped transform Scholz, Kleine-Brockhoff said. “He got a good education from Vladimir the Great.” A week later, Putin recognized the two separatist regions in Ukraine, and Russian forces invaded. Behrends’ SPD sources have told him that Scholz discussed the substance of his landmark speech on military spending with few beyond his closest advisers, which made for good theater in the Bundestag: Members who might have decried such a major shift were caught unaware and were carried along from applauding Scholz’s generalities about supporting Ukraine to applauding rhetoric whose import registered too late.
After the speech, applause poured in from Germany’s allies, too. A little more than three decades after Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand warned against German reunification, the leaders of the Western alliance were a generation removed from living through the Second World War and German military aggression. Their countries, the U.S. and others were desperate for Western Europe’s largest country to step up. “It represents the moment when Germany became comfortable — and found it inevitable — to become a military power, and when others around Germany became comfortable with that decision,” Kleine-Brockhoff said. “That was the momentous thing. You could hear the cheers from Paris and Warsaw. You could see the smiles from London and Washington.”
Scholz’s military shift calls for an immediate expenditure of a hundred billion euros on the armed forces and, in years ahead, a return to spending more than 2% of GDP on defense. Reaching the 2% threshold would meet Germany’s commitment to NATO. (Putin’s actions might achieve what former President Donald Trump’s browbeating never did.)
Notably unresolved, though, is how Germany plans to survive with much less of the Russian fossil fuels it has sought all these years. According to Bloomberg, the country now relies on Russia for two-thirds of its natural gas, half its coal and nearly a third of its oil. Extending reliance on nuclear energy won’t be an easy stopgap. Last fall, energy experts told me that prolonging the life of Germany’s three remaining nuclear plants wasn’t feasible; once the process of closing starts, it’s difficult to reverse. On Tuesday, Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a member of the Green Party, ruled out a nuclear extension.
The country could delay its exit from coal, but that would imperil its goals for sharply reducing carbon emissions. And electricity production is far from the only concern: Natural gas is used to make fertilizer and, crucially, for home heating in the winter. So assured had Germany been in its Russian pipelines that it is only now building two terminals on the North Sea to receive liquefied natural gas from other countries. The terminals will take at least two years to complete, and the gas itself will likely be far costlier. (The European Union, as a whole, announced plans this week to reduce annual imports of Russian natural gas by two-thirds.)
Berzina, of the German Marshall Fund, told me that the most immediate concern will be buying enough natural gas this summer to put in storage for next winter, at what will likely be painfully high prices. Beyond that, the country will need to invest heavily in switching as many households as possible from gas boilers to electric heating sources, which she said could cost thousands of dollars per home. To provide the energy for that additional electricity, she added, the country should reconsider its opposition to nuclear power, an aversion stemming from a combination of deeply rooted naturalist conceptions of the inviolability of German soil and Cold War-era fears about being caught in the middle of a nuclear war. “The moral imperative of Ukraine now outweighs this,” she told me.
That would represent a dramatic turnabout, but at the pace of current transformation in Germany, one shouldn’t rule out anything. During a recent forum, Kleine-Brockhoff was challenged by a participant who wanted to know how Germany could swing, in a matter of days, “from appeasement to brinkmanship.” “My answer is that it’s because it was so long in coming,” Kleine-Brockhoff told me. “Because the domestic debate lingered for years and got nowhere. Until the breaking point, and the breaking was the invasion.” He went on: “In the end, a democracy will defend itself and stand for democratic values. That I never doubted. The question is, would it come too late?”
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Just before 11 a.m. Moscow Standard Time on March 1, after a night of Russian strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, a set of Russian-language Twitter accounts spread a lie that Ukraine was fabricating civilian casualties.
One account created last year, @Ne_nu_Che, shared a video of a man standing in front of rows of dark gray body bags that appeared to be filled with corpses. As he spoke to the camera, one of the encased bodies behind him lifted its arms to stop the top of the bag from blowing away. The video was taken from an Austrian TV report about a climate change demonstration held in Vienna in February. But @Ne_nu_Che claimed it was from Ukraine.
Four Russian-language Twitter accounts posted a video that they claimed showed Ukrainian media had faked reports of civilian casualties. It is actually an unrelated clip from an Austrian TV report in February. The accounts were later removed by Twitter for violating its platform manipulation and spam policy. (Screenshots captured by ProPublica)“Propaganda makes mistakes too, one of the corpses came back to life right as they were counting the deaths of Ukraine’s civilians,” the tweet said.
Eight minutes later, another account, @Enot_Kremle_Bot, tweeted the same video. “I’M SCREAMING! One of the ‘corpses’ came back to life during a segment about civilian deaths in the Ukraine. Information war is reaching a new level,” they said.
Two other accounts created last fall within a few days of @Enot_Kremle_Bot soon shared the same video and accusations of fake civilian casualties. “Ukrainian propaganda does not sleep,” said one.
The Twitter profiles are part of a pro-Putin network of dozens of accounts spread across Twitter, TikTok and Instagram whose behavior, content and coordination are consistent with Russian troll factory the Internet Research Agency, according to Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who, along with another professor, Patrick Warren, has spent years studying IRA accounts.
The IRA burst into the American consciousness after its paid trolls used thousands of English-language accounts across social media platforms to influence American voters during the 2016 presidential election. The IRA was at the center of a 2018 Department of Justice criminal indictment for its alleged effort to “interfere with elections and political processes.”
“These accounts express every indicator that we have to suggest they originate with the Internet Research Agency,” Linvill said. “And if they aren’t the IRA, that’s worse, because I don’t know who’s doing it.”
An analysis of the accounts’ activity by the Clemson Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica found they posted at defined times consistent with the IRA workday, were created in the same time frame and posted similar or identical text, photos and videos across accounts and platforms. Posts from Twitter accounts in the network dropped off on weekends and Russian holidays, suggesting the posters had regular work schedules.
Many of the accounts also shared content from facktoria.com, a satirical Russian website that began publishing in February. Its domain registration records are private, and it’s unclear who operates it. Twitter removed its account after being contacted by ProPublica.
Russian Twitter Accounts That Disseminated Propaganda Posted Mostly During Working DaysWhile Twitter sees relatively constant use throughout the week, these accounts posted mostly during Russian working days.
Note: Data includes posts on Twitter from 28 accounts identified in the Clemson Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica analysis as exhibiting coordinated or bot-like behavior. The accounts were removed by Twitter. Source: Twitter. (Jeff Kao/ProPublica)The pro-Putin network included roughly 60 Twitter accounts, over 100 on TikTok, and at least seven on Instagram, according to the analysis and removals by the platforms. Linvill and Warren said the Twitter accounts share strong connections with a set of hundreds of accounts they identified a year ago as likely being run by the IRA. Twitter removed nearly all of those accounts. It did not attribute them to the IRA.
The most successful accounts were on TikTok, where a set of roughly a dozen analyzed by Clemson researchers and ProPublica racked up more than 250 million views and over 8 million likes with posts that promoted Russian government statements, mocked President Joe Biden and shared fake Russian fact-checking videos that were revealed by ProPublica and Clemson researchers earlier this week. On Twitter, they attacked jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and blamed the West for preventing Russian athletes from competing under the Russian flag in the Olympics.
Late last month, the network of accounts shifted to focus almost exclusively on Ukraine, echoing similar narratives and content across accounts and platforms. A popular post by the account @QR_Kod accused the Ukrainian military of using civilians as human shields. Another post by @QR_Kod portrayed Ukraine as provoking Russia at the behest of its NATO masters. Both tweets received hundreds of likes and retweets and were posted on the same day as the body bag video. At least two Twitter accounts in the network also shared fake fact-checking videos.
Twitter accounts such as @QR_Kod shared memes that echo propaganda spread domestically by Russian state media. @QR_Kod was later removed by Twitter for violating its platform manipulation and spam policy. (Screenshots captured by ProPublica)The findings indicate that professionalized trolling remains a force in domestic Russian propaganda efforts and continues to adapt across platforms, according to Linvill.
“I can’t stress enough the importance of understanding the way that this is a tool for Putin to control narratives among his own people, a way for him to lie to his own people and control the conversation,” Linvill said. “To suggest that the West is blanketly winning this information war is true only in some places. Putin doesn’t have to win the information war, he just has to hold his ground. And these accounts are helping him do that.”
After inquiries from ProPublica, all of the active accounts were removed from TikTok, and nearly all were suspended by Twitter. Meta said it removed one Instagram account for violating its spam policy and that the others did not violate its rules. None of the platforms attribute the accounts to the IRA. Twitter and TikTok said the accounts engaged in coordinated behavior or other activity that violated platform policies.
A TikTok spokesperson said the initial eight accounts shared with it violated its policy against “harmful misinformation.” TikTok removed an additional 98 accounts it determined were part of the same pro-Putin network.
“We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased safety and security resources to detect emerging threats and remove harmful misinformation,” said a statement provided by the company. “We also partner with independent fact-checking organizations to support our efforts to help TikTok remain a safe and authentic place.”
A Twitter spokesperson called the roughly 60 accounts it removed “malicious” and said they violated its platform manipulation and spam policy, but declined to be more specific. They said the company had determined that the active accounts shared by ProPublica had violated its policies prior to being asked about them. Twitter decided to leave the set of 37 accounts online “to make it harder for bad actors to understand our detections,” according to the spokesperson.
The accounts were removed by Twitter within 48 hours of ProPublica contacting the company about them. The week before, Twitter removed 27 accounts that the Clemson researchers also identified as likely IRA accounts.
“Our investigation into these accounts remains ongoing, and we will take further action when necessary,” said a statement from a Twitter spokesperson. “As is standard, when we identify information operation campaigns that we can reliably attribute to state-linked activity, we will disclose this to the public.”
Twitter declined to offer more details on why it left roughly 30 accounts that it identified as violative online to continue spreading propaganda. It also declined to comment on connections between the roughly 60 accounts in this recent network and the hundreds of accounts flagged by Linvill and Warren last spring as possible IRA profiles. Linvill said he identified the recent accounts largely based on their commonality with the previous set of 200.
“I connect these current accounts to the ongoing activity over the course of the past year by carefully tracking accounts’ tactics, techniques and procedures,” he said.
Platforms may be hesitant to attribute activity to the IRA in part because the agency has adapted and made its efforts harder to expose, according to Linvill. But he said social platforms should disclose more information about the networks it removes, even if it can’t say with certainty who is running them.
“In every other area of cybersecurity, dangerous activity from bad actors is disclosed routinely without full confidence in the source of the activity. We name and disclose computer viruses or hacker groups, for instance, because that is in the public interest,” he said. “The platforms should do the same. The Russian people should know that some sophisticated and well-organized group is covertly using social media to encourage support for Putin and the war in Ukraine.”
The Internet Research Agency is a private company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian entrepreneur known as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin is linked to a sprawling empire ranging from catering services to the military mercenary company Wagner Group, which was reportedly tasked with assassinating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The IRA launched in St. Petersburg in 2013 by hiring young internet-savvy people to post on blogs, discussion forums and social media to promote Putin’s agenda to a domestic audience. After being exposed for its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. election, the IRA attempted to outsource some of its English-language operations to Ghana ahead of 2020. Efforts to reach Prigozhin were unsuccessful.
But it never stopped its core work of influencing Russian-speaking audiences. The IRA is part of a sprawling domestic state propaganda operation whose current impact can be seen by the number of Russians who refuse to believe that an invasion has happened, while asserting that Ukrainians are being held hostage by a Nazi coup.
Prior to the invasion, accounts in the network identified by the Clemson Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica celebrated Russian achievements at the Olympics.
“They were deep in the Olympics, tweeting about Russian victories and the Olympics and how the Russians were being robbed by the West and not allowed to compete under their own flag,” Linvill said.
After the invasion began, they moved to unify people behind Putin’s war.
“It was a slow shift,” he said. “And this is something I’ve seen from the IRA before: When a significant world event happens, they don’t always know immediately how to respond to it.”
By late February, the network had found its voice in part by echoing messages from Russian officialdom. The accounts justified the invasion, blamed NATO and the West and seeded doubts about civilian death tolls and Russian military setbacks. When sanctions kicked in and Western companies began pulling out of Russia, they said it was good news because Russian products are better. (Two Twitter accounts in the network shared the same video of a man smashing an old iPad with a hammer.)
Accounts in the network responded to sanctions by posting videos disparaging Western products. (Screenshot captured by ProPublica)“These accounts were sophisticated, they knew their audience, and they got engagement far surpassing the number of followers that they had,” Linvill said.
Paul Stronski, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, reviewed content shared by more than two dozen of the Twitter accounts prior to their suspension. “A lot of this is the type of stuff I would expect from Russian trolls,” said Stronski, who reads and speaks Russian.
He said many of the accounts adopt an approachable and humorous tone to generate engagement and appear relatable to younger audiences present on social media.
“They’re very critical of prominent Russians who have criticized this war, questioning their patriotism,” Stronski said. “They’re saying in effect that during wartime you shouldn’t be criticizing your own. You should be lining up behind the state.”
When President Biden flubbed the pronunciation of “Ukrainians” during his recent State of the Union address, several of the accounts on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram shared the clip and mocked him. While that clip spread widely outside of the suspected IRA network as well, the accounts often spread more obscure content in coordination. Multiple Twitter accounts, for example, shared a screenshot of a Russian actor’s tweet that he cared more about being able to use Apple Pay than the war in Ukraine. The accounts criticized him, with one warning that “the internet remembers everything.”
Before the account takedowns, the Russian government had begun closing off the country from global social media and information sources. It restricted access to Twitter and blocked Facebook. The Russian legislature passed a law that allows for a 15-year sentence for people who contradict the official government position on the war. As a result, TikTok announced it would pause uploads of new videos in Russia.
Some of the accounts in the network saw the writing on the wall and prepared their audience to move to Telegram, a Russian messaging service.
“Friends! With happiness I'd like to tell you that I decided to make the t.me/enot_kremlebot channel, in which you will see analytics to the fullest extent. Twitter could block us any minute!” tweeted @Enot_Kremle_Bot on March 5. “I really don’t want to lose my treasured and close-to-my-heart audience! Go to this link and subscribe.”
CorrectionMarch 11, 2022: This story originally misstated what TikTok communicated about its actions. The company said that after receiving ProPublica’s questions, it removed any active accounts it had been asked about, along with 98 others that the social media company linked to a pro-Russia network identified by ProPublica; TikTok did not decline to say how many accounts were removed.
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