The AfD leak: who paid for the AfD's ads on Russian TV, and Frohnmaier's Russian spring of 2018 — edition 5

Edition 5 · 8 November 2026 · Preliminary — research in progress. This edition adds new findings to the earlier editions, which stay online unchanged: 1, 2, 3 and 4. It corrects one passage of edition 1 (see “Corrections” below). It reports what the leaked files show. The archive covers only 11 mailboxes, so it is a partial record.

In short#

• The AfD’s 2017 ads on Russian TV were paid for by the AfD itself. Before the 2017 federal election, an AfD spot ran in the programme of Russian state television as distributed in Germany. ZDF’s Frontal21 reported in May 2018 that it was unknown who had paid. The emails show that the AfD’s network for Russian-German voters in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), led by Eugen Schmidt, today a Bundestag member, budgeted €2,200 for a week of TV ads on “Russia1 and Russia24” and placed them through a provider of Russian channels in Germany. A member of the NRW state board wrote after the report that “the payment was made by the state association”. Schmidt wrote that he wanted to clear away “the rumours that the Kremlin is doing the advertising for us”.
• A letter from the Russian Peace Foundation is the first documented step of the 2018 “election observation” trip. In January 2018 Markus Frohnmaier, now AfD state chairman in Baden-Württemberg, told colleagues that the foundation had asked him to find up to six AfD Bundestag members to observe Russia’s presidential election. In March he led an approved trip of eight MPs; later emails name the Duma chairman as the inviting party.
• Frohnmaier’s spring 2018: the embassy, a press conference in Moscow, the Yalta forum. His office asked for an introductory visit to the Russian ambassador. It turned down an embassy reception because he would be at a press conference in Moscow with Crimea’s Russian-installed head Sergei Aksyonov and Duma committee chair Leonid Slutsky. Russian state media interviewed him repeatedly. In one case in March 2019 his office turned Sputnik down: “Russians again.. I consider that problematic.”

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. The AfD has confirmed the attack but not the authenticity of individual emails, and forged “AfD leak” emails are reported to circulate — so every claim cites the original file and its hash. For this edition 211 emails and documents were selected by keyword and from earlier leads, and read by an open-weight model. Every quote was checked to occur word for word in the source.

1. Who paid for the AfD’s ads on Russian TV (2017)#

In September 2017 German media reported that an AfD election spot was being shown on Russian state television. On 30 May 2018 ZDF’s Frontal21 reported more: the spot carried the AfD logo and the Russian slogan “Let’s vote AfD! For our common future” and ran during a live broadcast of the state channel Rossiya 1. It had been inserted by Kartina Digital, a Wiesbaden company that distributes Russian-language TV in Germany and whose shareholders, according to the report, include Victor Gushan, owner of the Transnistrian conglomerate Sheriff. Kartina would not say who had paid. The AfD said the ad was not from the federal party and that it did not know who had commissioned it (newsroom.de on Frontal21).

The emails of the NRW state party show who placed it:

• April–August 2017: Eugen Schmidt, who led the network “Russlanddeutsche für die AfD NRW”, sent state party officials invoices for AfD ads in Russian-language newspapers in Germany, asking it, for example, to transfer “€202.30 to the Westi newspaper with the AfD advertising for the May issue”. 1 2 3
• 23 August 2017, in an interim report on the federal campaign, Schmidt listed: “TV advertising for one week before the election date on the channels Russia1 and Russia24 – €2,200”. 4
• 26 September 2017, two days after the election, his summary listed “advertising in 2 Russian TV programmes (visible only in Germany)”, ads in several Russian-language papers and two AfD video spots made for €600 net, and linked the press reports about the TV ad. “I find that our campaign was a complete success,” he wrote. 5
• 4 June 2018, five days after the Frontal21 report, Schmidt wrote that “during the 2017 federal election campaign we placed the AfD advertising with a TV provider of Russian channels in Germany”. A manager of Kartina.tv had asked whether he could tell journalists that the ad had been “officially organised by AfD NRW”. He had “replied positively for now”, he wrote, “to clear away the rumours that the Kremlin is doing the advertising for us”; Kartina.tv “continues to make its advertising space available to us”. 6
• 6 June 2018, a member of the NRW state board wrote to the board that Frontal21 now suspected “that the Kremlin was the client and paid for the ad”. He went on: “We have meanwhile established that the payment was made by the state association; who the client was and on the basis of which board resolution is still being clarified.” The spot, he added, had used “the logo of the federal party unlawfully”. The state party’s office replied: “At no time did we work with any Russian bodies or even the government. Completely crazy.” 7
• 2019: in his final report on the European election campaign, Schmidt listed 12 ads in Russian-language papers in NRW. The planned TV advertising was “no longer approved by the provider (kartina.tv)”, which had taken “a lot of criticism from the press” over the AfD ad in the federal election. 8

The emails show the AfD side placing and paying for the TV ads through a German provider of Russian channels, whose feed for viewers in Germany carried the spot. They say nothing about the provider’s own motives or ties. The 2017 reports do not name the provider; Schmidt named Kartina.tv in 2018.

2. The Russian Peace Foundation and the 2018 “election observers”#

Edition 1 reported that AfD Bundestag members travelled to Russia for the presidential election of 18 March 2018 on the invitation of the Duma leadership. The emails show an earlier step:

• 27 January 2018: Markus Frohnmaier wrote to colleagues that “the Russian Peace Foundation has informed me in a letter that it would like to invite up to six Bundestag members of our group to observe the presidential election in Russia on 18 March 2018”. Anton Friesen replied: “Hello Markus, I’m in!” 9
• 29 January: names on his list of acceptances included Stefan Keuter, Anton Friesen, Waldemar Herdt, Robby Schlund and Dietmar Friedhoff. 10
• 31 January: Frohnmaier forwarded the foundation’s letter, which “asked me to find up to six members of our group” for the observation, to the group’s leadership and suggested carrying out the observation “as an official trip through the Bundestag administration, to ensure the greatest possible objectivity”. 11
• 19 March, the day after the election, his office sent the list of “the eight Bundestag members taking part in the approved AfD group trip led by Mr Frohnmaier”, noting that “the invitation came from the chairman of the Duma”. 12 A statement sent from his account and signed by him thanked Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin for the invitation and Leonid Slutsky, chair of the Duma’s foreign-affairs committee, “who made this undertaking possible”. It also congratulated Vladimir Putin on his re-election and called for the sanctions to be lifted. 13 The emails do not say how the foundation’s letter and the Duma invitation relate.

The Russian Peace Foundation is headed by Leonid Slutsky, today leader of the LDPR party. In 2023 the investigative outlet The Insider reported, citing GRU emails, that the foundation had passed passport data of foreigners it had invited to Russia to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence. The report names no Germans and gives no years (Current Time).

3. Frohnmaier’s Russian spring of 2018#

The mailbox of Frohnmaier’s Bundestag office shows a dense run of contacts with Russian state bodies and state media in the weeks around the election and the Yalta forum in occupied Crimea:

• 6 March 2018: his office wrote to the Russian embassy that Frohnmaier “would be very pleased to have the opportunity of an introductory visit to the Russian ambassador”. 14
• 21 and 28 March: after the election his office replied to a RIA Novosti request that he was “happy to be available for a phone interview”, and asked RT Deutsch whether it was interested in a video interview with him. 15 16
• 5 April: the embassy had invited him to an event on 11 April for the coming football World Cup. His office declined: Frohnmaier would, in that period, be “taking part in a press conference in Moscow together with Messrs Sergei Aksyonov, Andrei Nazarov and Leonid Slutsky”. 17 18 Aksyonov is the Russian-installed head of Crimea; he and Nazarov, co-chair of the business association Delovaya Rossiya, were the co-chairs of the Yalta forum (Izvestia).
• 11 April: a Sputnik correspondent wrote to his office: “We met at a press conference in TASS news agency in Moscow yesterday”, and asked for another interview at the Yalta forum. His office replied that he was “interested in another interview with you at IV Yalta International Economic Forum”. 19 20
• 19 April: Frohnmaier spoke at the forum’s opening in Yalta (Yevropeiska Pravda), greeting the participants on behalf of all foreign guests (Association of Lawyers of Russia).
• June 2018: the Russian broadcaster NTV asked for an interview about his “statement that Germany suffers economic losses due to anti-Russian sanctions”. When a Skype call failed, his office sent a video instead (“we’re filming right now”). 21 22

2019. In March 2019 Sputnik asked the party for an AfD member for a live radio interview. Frohnmaier’s personal assistant wrote to him: “Russians again.. this time about Kevork – do you want that? I consider that problematic.” The answer passed on to the party’s press office was: “No – and MF also asks that nothing further be said on the subject.” 23 24 On 8 April 2019 the federal board’s phone conference had “Markus Frohnmaier (Russia contacts)” on its agenda; the discussion, the minutes say, was held “above all with reference to the upcoming V Yalta International Economic Forum”. The copy of the minutes in the archive is incomplete at this point. 25

4. Further contacts at the top of the party#

• April–May 2017: Matthias Moosdorf, today a Bundestag member, proposed to Alice Weidel that she and Alexander Gauland, the two lead candidates, be received in Moscow, by hosts he did not name, in early July: “In Moscow there would be the possibility of receiving both lead candidates.” Gauland’s side, he wrote, “(Mr Kalbitz) thinks this is a good idea”, and “there are no consulting costs, by the way”. An earlier email spoke of presenting them “possibly at the end of June with a bang in Moscow with a result to show”. The emails do not show that the visit took place. 26 27
• January 2018: Matthias Lieschke, a state MP in Saxony-Anhalt, wrote to Weidel that during a few days in Moscow “a conversation with the federal board of the party Rodina came about”, rather by chance: “They are very interested in closer contact.” 28
• May 2024: Bundestag member Matthias Helferich asked the NRW state board to put Stefan Keuter on its agenda. He wrote that in a video Keuter himself recorded, Keuter “boasts about staying in a luxury hotel at Russia’s expense”, and that Keuter should be asked “about the financing of his various stays in Russia”, because the party would have to defend itself against the accusation of influence by Russian networks. This is an allegation made inside the party; the email does not include the video. 29

Corrections#

Edition 1 (section 3) said that the final payment for the 2017 TV ads was not shown, that we had found no press report of paid AfD spots on Russian state TV, and that any payment would have been “AfD money going to Russian state media”. The emails now show that the NRW state party paid. The TV ad was reported in May 2018 by ZDF’s Frontal21; Schmidt’s own 2017 summary already linked press reports about it. The booking went to Kartina, a German distributor of Russian channels, not to the Russian broadcasters directly.

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 and identifies it uniquely. Message-IDs and private email addresses are left out.

• sha256 ok means the file is unchanged since we indexed it — not that the email is genuine.
• DKIM pass means the sender’s server signed the message and the signature still verifies today — strong evidence of authenticity. Most cited emails are internal Bundestag or AfD mail without a signature; their display names and dates come from unsigned headers.

Quotes from the emails are translated from German, except those written in English.

Press sources#

• newsroom.de on ZDF Frontal21, 30 May 2018 — Oligarchenfirma verbreitet AfD-Wahlwerbung
• Current Time, 7 Dec 2023 — GRU received data on foreigners invited by Slutsky’s foundation
• Izvestia, Apr 2018 — Договорились на миллиарды
• Yevropeiska Pravda, 19 Apr 2018 — European politicians at the economic forum in occupied Crimea
• Association of Lawyers of Russia — Opening of the IV Yalta International Economic Forum

Evidence index#