A large-scale leak of internal correspondence from the German far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), made public in October 2026, has revealed new evidence of the involvement of Russian special services in organizing a trip by the party’s lawmakers to Syria in 2018. According to the Handelsblatt newspaper, AfD representatives used the assistance of Russian military intelligence to visit the war-torn country and establish contacts with the regime of Bashar al-Assad. This has drawn attention to the use by German far-right politicians of their parliamentary powers to advance political initiatives that aligned with the Kremlin’s interests.
The investigation was based on a leak of more than 420,000 AfD emails stolen during a hacker attack on the party’s IT provider in late September 2026. In March 2018, the then AfD security officer Peter M. stated in internal correspondence that Hezbollah representatives facilitated the delivery of the German delegation from Beirut to the Syrian border, after which Russians took over the escort. According to him, entry documents at various stages were arranged with the help of Hezbollah and Russian military intelligence (the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, or GRU). At the same time, Peter M. warned about the danger of the lawmakers being in a combat zone and the possibility that their visit would be used for the propaganda interests of the Kremlin and Damascus.
The delegation that arrived in Syria on 5 March 2018 included Bundestag members Frank Pasemann, Jürgen Pohl, Udo Hemmelgarn and Harald Weyel, North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament members Christian Blex and Thomas Röckemann, as well as party official Steffen Christ. The trip caused a resonance in German politics and disputes within AfD itself. Deputy party leader Georg Pazderski demanded that the party distance itself from the delegation, since it had not received a party mandate for the trip. However, the leadership’s warnings did not prevent the deputies from continuing contacts with representatives of the Syrian authorities.
One of the organizers of the Syrian trip, Christian Blex, had visited Russian-occupied Crimea just a month earlier, in February 2018, at the invitation of an organization headed by Yuri Gempel, a deputy of the Moscow-controlled Crimean parliament. In September 2022, C. Blex again traveled to Russia with party colleagues, planning to visit the occupied areas of Donbas on the eve of the illegal pseudo-referendums organized by the Kremlin. However, after a political scandal and criticism from the party leadership, the deputies abandoned the trip to the occupied territories of Ukraine, and the politician himself was expelled from the AfD parliamentary group in North Rhine-Westphalia.
While in Syria, AfD deputies met with high-ranking officials of B. Assad’s regime, including Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, Minister for National Reconciliation Ali Haidar, and Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem. After visiting territories controlled by government forces, members of the delegation made statements about the relative safety of certain areas of Syria and the possibility of returning refugees from Germany there. In particular, Jürgen Pohl suggested that Syrians could return to their homeland, although he later acknowledged that the short visit did not allow for a full understanding of the security and political situation in the country. Such statements contributed to the creation of an information backdrop favorable to Moscow and Damascus about the alleged normalization and stabilization of the situation in Syria, despite documented ongoing mass repressions by the B. Assad regime. According to Amnesty International data published back in 2017, more than 17,700 people had died in places of detention from torture and ill-treatment since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, and the number of extrajudicial executions in the Sednaya military prison alone during 2011–2015 may have reached 13,000.
The Syrian issue became an instrument of AfD’s domestic political activity: in November 2017, its parliamentary group submitted initiatives No. 19/32 and No. 19/48 to the Bundestag regarding negotiations with the B. Assad regime on the return of Syrian refugees, including a possible review of the grounds for stay in Germany for those who refused to return to Syria voluntarily. After the Syrian trip, AfD representatives continued to justify the need for agreements with Damascus based on their own subjective impressions of visiting the country. However, on 21 March 2018, the parliamentary committee on internal affairs rejected the AfD proposal by the votes of representatives of all other parliamentary groups.
Despite the failure, the German far-right did not stop political contacts with the Syrian regime. In November 2019, a second delegation of the AfD parliamentary group, led by Frank Pasemann and Waldemar Herdt, traveled to Syria. It also included Udo Hemmelgarn, Jürgen Pohl, and Steffen Kotré. The trip was organized by a special contact group on Syria created within the AfD faction. During the visit, the deputies met with representatives of the Syrian authorities, business, and religious organizations, discussing prospects for the country’s reconstruction and economic cooperation.
Notably, on 14 November 2019, on the eve of the second trip, AfD submitted draft resolution No. 19/15067 to the Bundestag on the normalization of diplomatic relations with Damascus, the resumption of the work of the German embassy in Syria, and a review of the decision regarding the Syrian ambassador. In the party’s official materials, it was stated that one of the tasks of the Syrian contact group was to use information obtained during meetings to prepare parliamentary initiatives. This indicated a transition from individual foreign trips to systematic political activity aimed at normalizing relations with a regime whose international isolation Moscow was trying to overcome. Such political interaction primarily corresponded to Russia’s interests, as it contributed to weakening the European policy of isolating the B. Assad regime, legitimizing Russia’s military intervention in Syria, and expanding the Kremlin’s opportunities to influence Germany’s foreign policy.
The materials published in October 2026 show that contacts between AfD representatives and the regime of Bashar al-Assad went beyond ordinary parliamentary diplomacy and were part of the Kremlin’s strategy of promoting its own interests through political forces in European states. The involvement of Russian military intelligence in organizing the trip of German deputies created conditions for Moscow to influence not only their contacts in Syria but also their subsequent political activity in Germany. By using short, Syrian-authorities-controlled visits as an argument in favor of the return of refugees, the restoration of diplomatic relations with Damascus, and the weakening of the international isolation of the B. Assad regime, AfD representatives helped transfer political positions favorable to Russia to the level of legislative initiatives in the Bundestag. At the same time, support for such decisions weakened European pressure on Russia’s Syrian ally, contributed to the escalation of domestic political contradictions in Germany over migration policy, and turned German parliamentarians into a tool for advancing the decisions the Kremlin needed inside the Federal Republic of Germany.
