The AfD leak and Russia: what 470,000 files show — preliminary findings

Edition 1 · 30 October 2026 · Preliminary — research in progress. Findings will be added, corrected or withdrawn in later editions; this page stays online unchanged as a dated snapshot.

In short

• No Russian money for the AfD has been found in the files assessed so far (about 60 of ~350 events). Where money appears, it runs the other way. The AfD’s NRW Russian-German network arranged and invoiced campaign advertising on Russian state television and in Russian-language papers in Germany, aimed at Russian-German voters.
• The benefits from the Russian side found so far are travel and hospitality. According to a later internal document, the Moscow City Government provided a private jet for party leaders’ return flight in 2017 (already reported). According to planning emails, hosts in occupied Crimea offered to cover accommodation, transfers and interpreters for an AfD delegation in 2018 (whether they actually paid is not shown).
• The contacts reach the Duma leadership. The emails say the AfD Bundestag members who “observed” the 2018 presidential election were invited by the Duma’s chairman Vyacheslav Volodin and its foreign-affairs chair Leonid Slutsky. They also show contacts or invitations with Duma committee chairs, a regional governor, the embassy and a consulate.
• The party leadership was involved. In April 2018 the federal board discussed MPs' planned trip to occupied Crimea, and Alice Weidel recommended entering via Odessa. Separately, the Russian embassy invited the then co-chairs Frauke Petry and Alice Weidel to a conference in Crimea in 2017; the emails do not show whether they accepted.
• Most of the trips were already public; many details were not. Who invited whom, who paid for what, and how the leadership handled it are largely unreported. They are listed below, each with a reference to the leaked file.

This is evidence of close political ties, which the AfD has never hidden. It is not evidence of control, payment or espionage. Nothing in the files examined so far shows that.

What we examined

The archive was published by the hacker group “Hexane” in October 2026: 421,180 emails and 48,572 attached documents from 11 AfD mailboxes, 2013–2026. Among them are the federal party office, the federal arbitration court, Alexander Gauland’s mailbox and the NRW state party. The AfD has confirmed the attack but not the authenticity of individual emails. Forged “AfD leak” emails are reported to circulate, so every claim here cites the original file.

How the research works (all automated steps run on open-weight models; a person — or Claude as editor — reads only the extracted findings, not the mail bodies):

1. Keyword and pattern rules select ~37,000 candidate messages. A language model classifies each one: is there contact with Russian state actors, Russian media, or intermediaries, and how strong is it? 806 messages show indirect or direct contact or more.
2. People mentioned in them are mapped into a network. External sources (Wikidata, sanctions lists, news) are checked for each person, and a dossier is written for 468 people. A second model checks every claimed tie against the original email text.
3. Ties that cite the same email at the same time are merged into events. Each event is rated for importance and compared with press reporting. Every claim below was then checked by hand against public reporting, and press sources are given.
4. Each cited file is re-hashed against the archive. Where the email carries a DKIM signature, the signature is checked against the sender’s current mail-server key.

Status of this edition: about 60 of ~350 events have been assessed. The newest classification models are still running. Absence of a finding here does not mean absence in the archive.

Key findings

1. Occupied Crimea: repeated trips, discussed by the federal board (2017–2019)

AfD state and federal MPs travelled to Russian-occupied Crimea repeatedly. The Feb 2018 delegation (3–9 Feb, Yalta) was widely reported at the time. The emails add how it was organised:

• The invitation came via Yuri Gempel, deputy chairman of the Crimean “parliament” (State Council) installed by Russia. According to a planning email, the Crimean side offered to cover accommodation, local transfers and interpreters; participants were to pay their own flights and part of the meals. Whether the hosts actually paid is not shown. 1 The trip itself is documented in a later trip report. 2
• A Russian-German AfD functionary in NRW, Eugen Schmidt (later a Bundestag member), coordinated the delegation on the AfD side; the emails do not show that he travelled himself. 1
• Before the April 2018 Yalta International Economic Forum, the federal board put the MPs’ planned trip on its agenda. According to the emails, Alice Weidel recommended entering via Odessa, i.e. from Ukrainian-controlled territory rather than via Russia — Ukraine treats entry via Russia as illegal. The board also set up a notification procedure for such trips. 3 4 5 Two of these emails carry valid DKIM signatures.
• MPs Waldemar Herdt and Gunnar Lindemann attended the April 2018 forum and met the president of the Crimean “parliament” and the region’s industry minister. 6 7

Press: the trips themselves were reported (Zeit, Welt, Spiegel, Tagesspiegel; UNIAN on Gempel’s invitation). The board’s handling and Weidel’s routing advice: no report found.

2. “Election observers” invited by the Duma leadership (March 2018)

A group of AfD Bundestag members travelled to Russia for the presidential election of 18 March 2018. Among them were Stefan Keuter, Waldemar Herdt, Robby Schlund, Steffen Kotré, Ulrich Oehme, Anton Friesen and Dietmar Friedhoff; Markus Frohnmaier appears in the planning. According to the emails, the group was invited by Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin and foreign-affairs committee chair Leonid Slutsky, and the AfD Bundestag group approved its own financial support for the trip. 8 9 10 11

Press: AfD “observers” were reported widely (Tagesschau, FR, Tagesspiegel on three Bavarian state MPs). The Duma leadership as host and the group’s own financing: no report found. Caveat: the emails do not make clear whether Volodin issued the invitation personally, and for some participants the invitation detail is only in other emails than the ones cited for them.

3. AfD advertising on Russian state TV for Russian-German voters (2017)

The NRW network “Russlanddeutsche für die AfD”, coordinated by Eugen Schmidt, arranged and invoiced AfD advertising slots on the Russian state channels Rossiya 1 and Rossiya 24 for the 2017 federal election campaign. 12 13 14 It also placed ads in Russian-language papers in Germany. 15 The final payment is not shown.

Press: CORRECTIV and ISD (2017) documented the network’s social-media pages, which shared Rossiya 1 clips and Sputnik articles, and print ads. Paid AfD spots on Russian state TV: no report found. If paid, this was AfD money going to Russian state media, not Russian money to the AfD.

4. Party leaders’ trips to Russia and contacts with officials (2016–2019)

• Feb 2017: Frauke Petry, Marcus Pretzell and board member Julian Flak travelled to Moscow on the invitation of the Moscow government. A later internal document states that the Moscow City Government provided a private jet for their return flight. 16 17 Press: reported (Spiegel: “Russian side paid flight for 25,000 euros”).
• Jul 2018: according to his own report, federal spokesman Jörg Meuthen travelled to Ulyanovsk and Moscow and met Ulyanovsk governor Sergei Morozov and Vladimir Gutenev, described in the emails as chair of the Duma’s economic and industrial committee and of the Russian Engineering Union. 18 19 Press: Meuthen announced it himself in a party press release (20 Jul 2018); we found little or no independent coverage.
• Feb 2019: an email from Andreas Kalbitz describes an “informal exchange of information” in Moscow (12–14 Feb) with Konstantin Malofeev, the sanctioned oligarch whom CORRECTIV describes as a financier of the armed fight in eastern Ukraine since 2014, together with MPs Frank Pasemann and Steffen Kotré. 20 Press: first reported from this leak by CORRECTIV (21 Oct 2026), which writes that Kalbitz announced it to the federal board as “fully privately financed”; according to Volksverpetzer, Kotré confirmed the trip.
• Dec 2016: Petr Bystron, then Bavarian state chairman, and Hansjörg Müller met the Russian Consul General in Munich to discuss German–Russian economic policy. 21 Press: no report found.

5. The embassy and the Duma as regular counterparts (2017–2018)

• Oct 2017: a first secretary of the Russian embassy in Berlin invited the then co-chairs Frauke Petry and Alice Weidel to a conference in Crimea. Staff forwarded the invitations internally; the emails do not show whether anyone accepted. 22 23 24 Press: no report found.
• Jun 2018: Robby Schlund, then chair of the Bundestag’s German-Russian parliamentary group, invited Andrei Makarov, chairman of the Duma budget committee, to a meeting in the Bundestag. 25 Press: no report of this invitation found.
• 2018: AfD MPs received invitations to embassy events and to meetings with ambassador Sergei Nechayev through the parliamentary group. 26 27

6. Russian state media as a regular channel

Markus Frohnmaier gave a live studio interview to RT International in Berlin (Apr 2018). His office agreed to a Sputnik interview at the Yalta forum in occupied Crimea (Apr 2018); the emails do not show whether it took place. 28 29 30 In 2017 a local AfD spokesperson requested accreditation for an RT producer and other Russian TV channels for the party’s Berlin election event. A Sputnik journalist sent coverage of the December 2017 party conference to the party press office. 31 32 Press: Frohnmaier’s closeness to Russian media and the 2017 Russian strategy paper calling him an MP “under absolute control” have been reported (Spiegel 2019). These specific contacts were not.

7. Russian-German networks: courted and funded by the AfD itself

The AfD’s federal board granted €2,000 for an event of its own Russian-German interest group (IGdRD) in Nuremberg in 2018. 33 34 35 The NRW party funded stands and flyers for Russian-German outreach. 36 37 In 2018 the leadership declined cooperation with a newly founded Russian-German council. 38 39 Our assessment: this is ordinary party campaigning in a voter group. So far the files show no tie from these networks to Russian state bodies, such as Rossotrudnichestvo, Russkiy Mir or compatriot councils.

What we did not find (so far)

• No cash payment, loan or donation from Russian state actors, Russian companies or intermediaries to the AfD or its officials. The only benefits are the travel and hospitality described above. The “funding” hits were the AfD’s own spending.
• No instructions from Russian officials and no contact with intelligence services. The 2019 report that Russian strategists considered Frohnmaier “under absolute control” is not reflected in the emails examined.
• The Voice of Europe affair (Bystron, 2024) and the Social Design Agency plans appear so far only as press reports and internal reactions, not as payment records or instructions. The 11 mailboxes are mostly party offices, not the personal mailboxes of the people concerned.

How to verify

Every reference [n] points to a file in the published archive. The afd:// address gives the mailbox and the mbox file (or document). The SHA-256 is the hash of the raw message as stored in the archive and identifies it uniquely, so anyone holding the archive can find and recompute it. Message-IDs are left out because some contain private domains.

• sha256 ok means the file in the archive is unchanged since we indexed it. It says nothing about whether the email is genuine.
• DKIM pass means the sender’s mail server signed the message, and the signature still verifies today. That is strong evidence the email is authentic.
• Most cited emails are internal AfD or Bundestag mail without a DKIM signature. Of 179 cited files checked so far, 5 verify by DKIM, 10 fail (old keys are often rotated) and 164 are unsigned.

Findings are model-extracted and checked by a second model. The press comparison was done by hand for the items above, but “no report found” means only that our searches found none.

Press sources

• CORRECTIV, 21 Oct 2026 — Strategien, Kontoauszüge und Adresslisten: Was im AfD-Leak steckt
• Spiegel, 5 Apr 2019 — Markus Frohnmaier: Russen setzten auf AfD-Abgeordneten
• Tagesschau — AfD-“Wahlbeobachter” in Russland: Statisten in Putins Inszenierung?
• Tagesspiegel — Kritik an Wahlbeobachtung in Russland: AfD mahnt drei bayerische Landtagsabgeordnete ab
• Tagesspiegel — Die Russland-Reisen der AfD: „Die Krim ist jetzt die russische Krim"
• Welt — AfD: Erst zu Assad, nun auf die Krim
• Zeit, Apr 2018 — AfD and Linke politicians at the Yalta economic conference
• UNIAN — German MP visits occupied Crimea defying Ukraine law
• Free Russia Foundation — analysis of the AfD visit to Crimea
• AfD press release, 20 Jul 2018 — Jörg Meuthen: Dialog und Kooperation mit Russland
• CORRECTIV, 18 Sep 2017 — Stimmenfang auf Russisch
• Volksverpetzer — Markus Frohnmaier & die gesamte Russland-Connection der AfD

Evidence index