Petr Bystron, of far-Right AfD party, allegedly given €20,000 by pro-Kremlin broadcaster
A German politician has been filmed taking large sums of cash from a Kremlin-supporting broadcaster, Czech intelligence has claimed.
Petr Bystron, who is standing for Alternative for Germany (AfD) at European parliamentary elections in June, allegedly received €20,000 (£17,000) in cash from the manager of a Russian propaganda network while sitting in a parked car, recordings indicate.
Mr Bystron, who also sits on the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, has previously denied allegations of taking Russian money as a “defamation campaign”.
The Security Information Service (BIS), the Czech Republic’s domestic intelligence agency, now says Mr Bystron met with Artem Marchevsky, who allegedly managed a Kremlin-backed propaganda front called Voice of Europe, at least three times in the past six months.
Some user at a .ml community the other day was mocking the idea that Russia was trying to destabilize Europe, comparing someone else's depiction of Russia as if it was an EU4 country. This is another piece of evidence that Russia has been financing far right politicians, parties and think tanks in several countries, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Despite being on .ml, there's a real issue with Tankies here. They hate the USA which...like fair enough, not exactly a paragon of virtue them. But then they go waaaay the other way and think China and Russia are utopian meritocracies, it's fucking bizarre.
There's a very common mental trapping in humans where, once you've identified a serious problem or antagonist, you immediately become more sympathetic to its opposites or declared rivals. A lot of them had a genuine, valid concern with a capitalist society that was screwing them over, turned that into an identity, and ended up in echo chambers where that fallacy wouldn't be called out. It's difficult to get them out of there because they feel like they have to defend their identity and their social group, so in the rare cases where they meet someone who does understand and share their valid anti-capitalist positions but is capable of reasonably calling out their campist bullshit, they immediately jump to think it's just "another lib" and refuse to engage.
Turns out Russia sucks pretty bad at real war but they've been excelling at these shadow ops for quite some time. The fact that they've bought so many plants in the US government is a sign of the success they've had.
He is their dictator. When people say the name of a country they generally refer to their government. For example: Iran is violently misogynistic. The Iranian women who riot against the government’s misogyny are not, I’ve met multiple militantly feminist Iranians in fact. But people understand what I mean when I say that Iran is misogynistic.
I think it's easy to read between lines that I mean the Russian government, currently led by Putin, rather than personally accusing all Russians of being assholes.
And Hitler was not Nazi Germany?
Believe it or not, but Putin is not the sole doer of all of Russia. There are a lot of people directly and indirectly involved in all of this shit and even more so are complicit by inaction. Many Germans knew what the Nazis did to the Jews and "traitors", but they still kept their mouth shut, ratted out their friends and neighbors, or had positions directly involved with the Nazis, so that they themselves could continue living a comfy life while others suffered and died by their own country.
No, Putin is not Russia. But Russia still has a collective responsibility, and with that guilt, painting all of their hands in blood. And this type of debt will not be forgotten until a certain price has been paid.
Can we finally ban this anti-democratic, Russian-psyops-spreading POS of a political Party? I fucking hate the AFD with a burning passion you can't imagine.
Everyone who votes for these fuckers just need to fucking cope that the war is over.
Democratic Germany best Germany!
Get rekt fascist keks.
While I agree on the AfD sentiment, we're not exactly living in a democracy. When money/corporations have way more influence on politics than voters, that's not even remotely resembling democracy.
A flawed democracy is still a democracy - and Germany is widely regarded, despite some corruption, as one of the best-functioning democracies in the world (5th best according to the Democracy Matrix - which is admittedly from a German university - and 12th best according to the Economist's Democracy Index). There are no serious scholars doubting this.
I agree with the sentiment, but objectively democracy is a terrible form of government. We just haven't come up with anything better, and the other options are even worse.
The problem with democracy is that to really work it requires an informed electorate, and a lot of the information the electorate get is propaganda. But like you say, I don't have a better alternative to offer.
Funny isn't it...all the time our right wing assholes talk about foreign traitors but in the end it's always them. I bet their Nazi grandfathers are rotating in their graves at lightspeed 😂
So, in Germany, does anything happen to this Russia war enabler? Or is it like America where someone just screams "both sides" and "but his tan suit" and all courts and laws get disabled?
My guess is if this blows up enough and the far right can't simply deny that it happened any more they will distance themselves a bit, perhaps throw him out.
Its just lip service though, the party is in large parts propped up by russia, and the members are all either corrupt shitstains doing the same as the guy who got caught or brainwashed idiots who themselves are the best argument against democracy and equal voices for everyone.
We call them "exceptions" here, they'll kick him out and say everyone else of the AfD is not like that. People will believe it and keep voting for them even harder because now. It's a shit show.
Well, his party is trying to make people forget he's in there for fear of losing votes. Given that this party is the "presentable" face of the hard right I hope he gets as much media attention as possible.
Not sure anything is going to happen to him personally but he's a politician and this is corruption so probably not.
My logic says yes but mostly it's gonna be PR issues. But reality says there won't be any other consequences because politicians don't like to oust other politicians and courts don't wanna get involved with separation of power issues.
Sure, Germany's conservatives take payments from Putin just like U.S. conservatives, but how many handjobs have they given in a theater full of kids? They need to step up their conservative game.
From the late 1960s until the early 1990s, with the authorization and financial support of the Berlin Senate, Kentler placed neglected youth as foster children in the homes of single pedophile fathers with the ostensible purpose of resocializing them, while explicitly encouraging sexual contact between them.
I thought that sounded like a Behind the Bastards episode (The School that Raped Everybody), but that looks to be a different German child rape scandal about the Odenwald school.
The thing is, it was already known they were in contact and the politician in question claimed he did nothing sketchy. So he's not only corrupt, or a traitor to our country, or (most likely) both, he also already publicly lied about it and there is supposedly evidence he actually accepted money. This makes things much worse for him.
His party also already claimed it's a smear campaign, so if there really is evidence, they'll look pretty stupid as well (although this really isn't news).
This is AfD, our resident fascist clown party. At least we have a coalition based democracy, so it's unlikely that they take over the less fascist “center”-right party.
Financing your friends and bankrupting your enemies is a strategy western nations perfected during the Cold War and employed to brutal effect in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR.
But its not a trick that's unique to western intelligence. Chinese officially had effectively bought out Hong Kong long before it transitioned into Beijing's control. Singapore, Myanmar, Vietnam, and the better part of the African eastern seaboard are undergoing a similar conversion as Chinese exports ramp up.
Russia's economic influence over Ukraine was a big part of what triggered the civil war in 2014 and the Crimea takeover that same year. The Russian government has succeeded in quelling revolts in Chechnya with investment dollars in a way they never managed with military forces. They've got friends in Italy, Greece, and France as well as Germany, thanks in no small part with the open purse of Russian lobbyists and intelligence groups.
The whole BRICS coalition is about coordinating financial flow through these high population third-world states operating slightly outside the western periphery. Its been happening since 2008, when the western operated international financial system faulted. Every country with the means and the leadership has been building up parallel institutions, in order to buffer themselves against the next big Wall Street / London financial crash.
Saber rattling from the outside, paid-off politicians on the inside. In the short term, pushes policies towards groveling before Russian aggression, in the long term, establishes precedence and shifts the general accepted attitude to dealing with their pressure.
Before Ukraine Russia funded right-wingers because they were anti-EU. Some of them were quite open about it. I don't think anything has changed. Money just takes a longer route and people keep quiet about it.
Very likely this. Transfers above a certain threshold are automatically looked into to prevent money laundering, so getting a big bunch of cash at once is less convenient than getting several, smaller payments.
Small enough to not get noticed, too little to cover their lifestyle for long, yet too convenient to not take :)
The big paydays usually happen through companies the politician and his ilk are in the board of, which just score very lucrative contracts or orders time after time. Or the politician is hired as a consultant for such companies, collecting fabulous kickbacks. Or the promise of early retirement into "window-looking jobs," employment where they have a title, high income and zero responsibilities.
If your blackmailing someone forcing them to take cash from you can them be used to blackmail the person further. They can press on them more, because they are now collaborators and won't get any symphony from the public or a jury.
A common theme in politics around the world is that you can buy politicians for a shockingly low amount of money. In the UK we've had politicians paid off for similar amounts, or politicians bought for £100k for basically their entire career.
You should see how many American politicians are just as corrupt for less money, I was surprised when I saw Devin Nunes was only making $15K from one of the bribery schemes that was supporting him while he was in Congress. I guess it all comes down to knowing your worth to the scumbags you work for. 🤷♂️
This is actually a sign of rampant corruption. Bribery is a tight market, and with a lot of politicians willing to accept bribes the cost drops significantly. It's one of the few areas where capitalism behaves as believed.
That's honestly the most disgusting part of it to me. The amount of money they make doing it is barely enough to insulate them from the effects of living in a worse country
If they got $250k to redirect $1m in funding to a company, I wouldn't like it but I would understand why someone without morals would sell out like that
But it's more like $100k over a decade at the cost of billions to the country. Half the time, they're basically just funding their next campaign... they're burning our society, and they don't even come out ahead
I've had the "pleasure" of rubbing elbows with a few of the people currently engaged in bribery political donations. I hear the going rate is about $10k and a nice meal.
That's the thing. Campaigns are super expensive AND the politician doesn't get to keep the money, so if you can find a politician who takes cash payment it's way cheaper than "legitimate" political spending.
It's in a twisted way a major reason mega corps like the massive expense of lobbying and PACs. Bribes are cheap and anybody can do it, but pulling together millions for PACs and campaigns is something smaller companies and individuals can't do.
You're often seeing the tip of the iceberg, with significantly more money changing hands under the table or being paid out with in-kind services like friendly media coverage or consulting services or loans.
That I'd be OK with. Or just pocketing the cash and telling their own agents who's bribing and how.
But this twat might be dumb enough to actually do some dumb shit in return.
Also 20k, are the Russians that broke? The dude so insignificant? Or this just the tip of the money pile?
Too many Putin-worshipping Russians live in Germany. You can usually tell who they are by their names, when a 20-something guy is named „Karl“ or „Eugen“ or some similarly old-ass German name nowadays, they’re most likely Russian. It’s creepy why don’t they go live with their Führer?