2023-11-16 21:10:08
Hubert Seipel was never an expert on Russia. He doesn’t even speak Russian. But the journalist’s exclusive access to Vladimir Putin gave him a reputation and a great response in Germany. Millions of German citizens watched his documentaries about Putin, listened to him on talk shows, and tens of thousands read his books. Seipel was able to accompany Putin for weeks, on deer hunts in Siberia or in his limousine in Moscow, and question him for hours.
The fact that his books were also published in Russian, and that Putin himself came to the presentation of the Russian edition in Moscow in 2016 and had a copy signed by the German with a smile, showed that Seipel was an instrument of the Kremlin because he incorporated its view of the world into his films and books. “The Kremlin celebrates Hubert Seipel,” wrote the FAZ’s Russia correspondent at the time.
It has now become known that Seipel received 600,000 euros from Russia for his second book about Putin, published in 2021, paid with the help of a network of companies by the oligarch Alexei Mordashov, who is close to Putin. There are many indications, writes “Spiegel”, which revealed the story in Germany together with ZDF, that the journalist working for NDR also received a corresponding payment from the Kremlin for his first Putin book, which was published in German in 2015. got circles.
Was Seipel an exception? Certainly not in one respect. It was not only in his case that the public broadcasters were only too willing to let Kremlin apologists spread Russian propaganda at prime time. They obviously didn’t ask themselves whether this met the standards of critical journalism. In the era of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, this happened regularly and obviously under political auspices. Steinmeier’s benevolent formula of “change through integration” with Russia was reflected in the treatment of the Putin regime on German talk shows. After all, they have a market share of ten to 15 percent, meaning they are seen by millions.
Most frequently visited: A lobbyist for Gazprom
An example of the connection: At the end of 2006, the Russian ambassador Vladimir Kotenev, an agitator of the Putin school, was allowed to broadcast his view of the Russophobia allegedly rampant in Germany on the talk show “Sabine Christiansen” on Sunday evening. The Russian opposition figure Garry Kasparov was disinvited from the show because otherwise Kotenev would not have come. “Russia expert” Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, who has trivialized Putin and Kremlin politics for years in her books, was on the show. Talk show host Christiansen was a regular guest at Kotenjov’s lavish celebrations, which the so-called party ambassador organized in the Russian embassy Unter den Linden and where Berlin political celebrities appeared in large numbers.
Even after the breach of international law through the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in Donbass instigated by Moscow, talk show guests who were uncritical of Putin’s policies or who were even paid directly by the Kremlin continued to dominate on public television. The impression was created that these were independent journalists or experts. The journalist Marcus Welsch recently evaluated the talk shows on ARD, ZDF and Phoenix that were about Russia, Ukraine or Russian foreign policy for the years since the end of 2013, when Euromaidan took place in Ukraine.
His findings, published in the “Russia Analyzes,” are frightening: pro-Russian actors were most frequently invited until 2022. In first place comes Gazprom lobbyist Alexander Rahr, who worked for the German Council on Foreign Relations for eighteen years until he moved into business in 2012. Rahr had already written a friendly book about Putin in 2000, but it took until 2019 for him to receive the Order of Friendship from Russia.
Today the friends of the Kremlin are on YouTube
In second and third place are Dmitrij Tultschinskij, a journalist from the state agency Ria Novosti, and Harald Kujat, a retired air force general. D., former Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, served in 2016 on the supervisory board of an alleged Russian research institute that the oligarch Vladimir Yakunin founded in Berlin. Kujat said at the time that the oligarch’s think tank “can contribute to the formation of opinions in an open pluralistic society.” Deterrence is wrong in relation to Russia, but relaxation is right, says Kujat. He saw the cause of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine not in the aggressor in Moscow, but primarily in NATO. Even today he says that Ukraine is fighting for the geopolitical interests of the United States.
Michael Hanfeld Published/Updated: Recommendations: 57 Markus Wehner, Berlin Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 30 Reinhard Bingener, Hannover Published/Updated: Recommendations: 10 Michael Hanfeld Published/Updated: Recommendations: 101
The top ten talk shows with a connection to Russia and Ukraine until 2022 also include Hubert Seipel and the aforementioned Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, who – if you exclude the Phoenix rounds with a smaller reach – are even among the top three of the most invited Studio guests counted. The former ARD correspondent recently withdrew her lawsuit against the Munich-based Eastern Europe historian Franziska Davies, who proved Krone-Schmalz disinformation about Russia and Ukraine.
The propagandist Ivan Rodionov was also a frequent guest on the station’s talk shows after the annexation of Crimea. The rhetorically skilled Russian was for years editor-in-chief of RT Deutsch, the offshoot of the Russian propaganda channel that was formerly called Russia Today. Today Rodionov spreads his propaganda on a YouTube channel called Infrared, which features former employees of the RT channel, which is now banned in the EU.
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