For more than two years now, repression against opponents of war has been intensifying in Germany. Associations and organizations have been banned, and there has been a sharp rise in prosecutions for alleged “incitement of the people” or the “approval of criminal acts”. This year, the European Union added personal sanctions explicitly designed to destroy people’s livelihoods. Public attention has largely focused on repression against Palestine solidarity, but those who resist the officially prescribed Russophobia are also in the crosshairs. With full force, opposition is to be eliminated (on the streets, in the media, and in cultural life). The EU and the Federal Republic of Germany are moving toward a state of martial law, as the following examples make clear.
Sanctions against journalists
In May 2025, the EU’s 17th sanctions package placed journalists and bloggers Alina Lipp, Thomas Röper, and Hüseyin Dogru, founder of the red.media collective, on the EU sanctions list for alleged “Russian destabilization efforts”. This week, former Swiss Army colonel Jacques Baud was also sanctioned.
What this means in practice was revealed by an inquiry from the daily newspaper Junge Welt to the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. In October 2025, the paper asked whether it could hire Dogru as an editor. The ministry replied that doing so would violate the so-called “provision ban”. According to this interpretation, a sanctioned individual such as Dogru may receive “no economic benefit whatsoever” (including wages for paid employment). Violating the provision ban would constitute a criminal offense.
This legal interpretation by the Ministry of Economic Affairs directly contradicts the assessment of legal experts who testified on November 11, 2025, during a hearing of the European Council on the legality of these sanctions. In their view, the EU’s current sanctions regime against individuals accused of “disinformation” violates EU law and international law on multiple counts. The measures are legally flawed, disproportionate, and incompatible with fundamental rights.
Criminalizing humanitarian aid
At the end of May 2025, members of the association Friedensbrücke-Kriegsopferhilfe (Peace Bridge-War Victims Aid) were subjected to house searches and arrest warrants as part of an investigation under Paragraph 129a (forming a terrorist organization) and Paragraph 129b (criminal and terrorist organizations abroad). Among other activities, the association organizes solidarity projects for the civilian population in Donbass.
In the investigation order issued by the Federal Prosecutor General, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics were classified as terrorist and criminal organizations on the grounds that they had “occupied eastern Ukraine” starting in 2025 (likened to ISIS’s occupation of territory in Syria and Iraq). Humanitarian aid to these regions was therefore deemed support for terrorism. This legal position originates in Ukraine, where it has been used, among other things, to legitimize the shelling of civilians in Donbass. It contradicts international humanitarian law, which distinguishes between civilians and combatants, yet it has been adopted wholesale by Germany’s Federal Prosecutor.
A full-scale smear campaign was launched against one association member, Liane Kilinc. In a coordinated investigation by television networks and newspapers, journalists claimed to have uncovered evidence that Kilinc had collaborated with Russia’s FSB intelligence service. Contrary to her public statements, they alleged that her organization had delivered far more extensive shipments to Donbass than previously known. Analyses of social media accounts were said to show that she had also transported militarily usable goods (such as drone components, counter-drone technology, and camouflage nets) to the front lines in significant quantities.
The Russian document allegedly proving these claims reportedly came from a dataset held by the London-based “Dossier Center,” financed by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which journalists said they had been able to access. In addition, Kilinc was accused of regularly passing information from Germany to a Russian contact, including details about military convoys and job postings by arms manufacturers.
According to Kilinc, who spoke with the author, Friedensbrücke-Kriegsopferhilfe has been legally represented since early December and continues its work. The organization is convinced it will not receive a fair trial in Germany. Kilinc stresses, however, that the association has not been banned and that there is no evidence supporting the accusations. There is therefore no reason, she says, to distance oneself from the organization out of anticipatory obedience.
Falko Hartmann, an activist with the association who lives in Germany and has also been targeted by these measures, emphasizes that the retroactive classification means anyone who provided humanitarian aid between 2014 and 2022 is now at risk of prosecution (despite having had no way of anticipating this at the time).
Hartmann describes what happened to him: On May 16, 2025, a ten-member unit of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) entered his property. After a nine-hour search, his phone, computer, data storage devices, and the association’s files were seized. At the same time, another organization, on whose board Hartmann serves, was targeted. Its offices and exhibition spaces were also searched by the BKA. The contents of Hartmann’s phone and computer were copied, all his social media accounts were hacked, and their passwords changed. In October, his bank account and savings account were terminated by his banks.
Cultural “decolonization”
Since long before February 2022, academic circles in Slavic studies and Eastern European history have promoted the concept of “decolonizing” European scholarship and culture from so-called “Russian colonial-imperial discourses”. The premise is that Russia (whether in its tsarist, Soviet, or bourgeois-democratic form) has always sought to shape European culture through imperial domination.
Historian Gerd Koenen claims that an uncritical adoption of Russian colonial ideology is especially prevalent in Germany, which he labels the “German Russia complex”. According to Slavic studies scholar Gerhard Simon, this must finally be overcome because Russia, through its “war of aggression against Ukraine”, has “definitively excluded itself from the civilized world”. (See: “Decolonize Russia! Militarized Eastern European Studies,” Marxistische Blätter 2024/4.)
Alongside an aggressive anti-Russian shift in discourse at German institutes of Eastern European and Slavic studies, these ideologues are campaigning for the removal of Soviet monuments in Germany. Most recently, in November, a symposium titled “Echoes of Empire: Soviet Monuments and the Machinery of Disinformation” was held as part of “Berlin Freedom Week”. The event took place at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland and was organized by the World Liberty Congress, the Axel Springer Freedom Foundation, the Ukrainian Institute, the Federal Commissioner for the Reappraisal of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) Dictatorship, the German Foreign Office (as a financial supporter), the embassies of the three Baltic states, the Polish and Lithuanian cultural institutes, and the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge).
Kateryna Rietz-Rakul of the Ukrainian Institute summarized the purpose of this cooperation bluntly: Ukrainians, she said, would help Germans overcome their moral reservations (!) about dismantling Soviet monuments and flags. She described commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the defeat of fascism as a “witches’ sabbath”.
These demands are echoed by historians closely aligned with the German armed forces (Bundeswehr). At a panel discussion on February 12 of this year, the Bundeswehr’s Center for Military History and Social Sciences and the German Research Foundation’s research group “Cultures of Military Violence” addressed the topic of “illegitimate violence and cultures of violence in Russian and Soviet wars past and present”. Historian Kristiane Janeke complained that Operation Barbarossa remains a “moral obstacle” to removing Soviet monuments in Germany – but left no doubt about her position: “They have to be removed”.
Harassment of the Russian House
The Russian House of Science and Culture on Berlin’s Friedrichstraße offers an extensive program promoting Russian culture and language in Germany. It regularly hosts cultural evenings, exhibitions (most recently on the history of anti-fascist resistance in Europe) and language courses.
According to the Munich Administrative Court, the Russian House falls under EU sanctions because it is an institution of the Russian state organization Rossotrudnichestvo (an organization that aims to introduce people to Russian culture), which is on the sanctions list.
As a result, the Russian House is only permitted to maintain operations at a bare subsistence level. As with personal sanctions, a “provision ban” applies, meaning no revenue may be generated. The court ruled that the “continued holding of events, exhibitions, and courses at their previous scale (no matter how culturally valued or politically unobjectionable) does not serve the satisfaction of basic needs.”
The Russian House is not allowed to freely access its account at the German Federal Bank. Transfers must be approved by the central bank. In one case involving electricity bills, the bank demanded proof of how electricity was used in specific parts of the building, including a detailed breakdown of different areas within the 30,000-square-meter facility.
The Russian House accused the Federal Bank of illegally obstructing its ability to carry out its non-sanctioned cultural activities. Illegal, it argues, because temporary sanctions must not deprive an institution of its means of existence and operation. The Russian House warned of severe consequences: without the release of funds, operations would have to cease, as the electricity provider would cut off power due to continued non-payment. The court’s ruling is not yet final.
In the end, they come for all of us
These examples show that German authorities and their ideological allies are aggressively pushing a revision of Germany’s fascist history. Any doubts about the narrative of an unprovoked Russian war of aggression against Ukraine are to be eliminated (as are any doubts about the moral justification for Germany’s militarization). To achieve this, a whole arsenal is deployed: illegal sanctions practices, ideological production, and the destruction of human existences included. The ruling elites demonstrate that they care about their own laws and legal standards only as long as those remain useful to them.
Even if the war in Ukraine is frozen, no improvement can be expected. Germany must become the leading military power in Europe if it is to fulfill its special role against Russia in the imperialist world war. Anti-fascists and opponents of war therefore face the task of organizing protest and resistance, here and now. Because first they target journalists, humanitarian workers, and Russian cultural institutions. In the end, they come for all of us.
Alexander Kiknadze is a member of the Communist Organization (KO). Under the title “Germany Is Moving Toward Martial Law,” he published a longer article on this topic on July 30 at NachDenkSeiten.
The post Germany inches towards martial law through mandated Russophobia appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.
From Peoples Dispatch via This RSS Feed.