Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer is the head of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, and likely successor to Angela Merkel as Chancellor. In a conversation with BERLIN POLICY JOURNAL, she played up the threat of Russian influence operations in European politics.
Russia has its own agenda. And this agenda evidently includes an attempt to destabilize Europe and, consequently, Germany.
She doesn’t think it’s a hoax.
Russia is a very large, diverse country with wonderful people and an incredible amount of potential. At the same time, you have a Russian government in place that takes drastic, uncompromising action in its own country and denies other peoples the right to self-determination—the conflicts in Georgia and East Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea have shown this. We have to be clear about this. If Russia is using factories of trolls to run campaigns of misinformation in the West or influence elections, we can’t sweep that kind of thing under the rug.
Source: “Russia Wants to Destabilize Europe” | Berlin Policy Journal – Blog
