How Russia tried to influence regional elections in Germany: The Berlin-based Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS) published a study on Russian disinformation campaigns in Germany targeting state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, as well as municipal elections in Lower Saxony, all of which took place in September 2026. The study's authors tracked four Russian campaigns: Storm-1516, Operation Overload (known as "Matryoshka"), Doppelganger, and the smaller Foundation to Battle Injustice. For monitoring, specifically, the AI-based Osavul platform developed in Ukraine and the Whoishostingthis tool for analyzing the social network X were used. As an example of one of the many episodes of the Russian disinformation campaign, CeMAS cites a video that appeared on social media days before the election in Saxony-Anhalt. It shows a dark-skinned man opening mail-in ballot envelopes and discarding votes received for the far-right party "Alternative for Germany." The caption to the video claimed that this is how election committee members with immigrant roots supposedly try to rig the election. As journalists from Correctiv later discovered, the video turned out to be staged. All the ballot papers shown had the same number and name. Nevertheless, the video managed to rack up hundreds of thousands of views. Did these fakes work? DW sorted it out