Russian FIMI networks reinforced locally announced protests through original reporting and direct appeals. Local organizers issued the calls first; FIMI channels quickly followed. In Germany, these channels amplified strongly pro-Russian organizers whose possible direct Kremlin links warrant further investigation. Key topics:
The Blurred Line Between Amplification and Interference
“It’s Your Turn”: From German Protests to French Audiences
Executive Summary
Russian FIMI activity around protests in Germany and France shows how information support for existing movements can approach interference in their mobilization. Local movements emerged and announced their actions. FIMI actors picked up those announcements, circulated information ahead of demonstrations, and added their own political framing.
Their contribution extended beyond reposts: Russian state-media interviews, original commentary, and direct appeals encouraged participation and presented domestic grievances as evidence that European governments were preparing for war with Russia while neglecting their own populations.
Germany offers the clearest indications of how this support can approach interference. On May 6, Russian state-controlled RT DE promoted the School Strike Against Conscription scheduled for two days later, publishing slogans and plans for demonstrations in 79 cities. The organizers had announced the strike in April.
The movement emerged in late 2025 in response to Germany’s new military-service legislation. Its first nationwide school strike took place on December 5, 2025, with demonstrations in around 90 cities. Further actions followed in 2026, culminating in another nationwide mobilization on September 25.
The September 25 strike was likewise announced in July, before FIMI channels advertised it. In June, the FIMI channel Medienzensur amplified Anti-Spiegel’s portrayal of intelligence scrutiny of the movement as political repression. By September, another FIMI channel, Node of Time DE, was circulating protest voices declaring:
“We, the youth, don’t want to meet our end in trenches for Merz, Pistorius, and all the other warmongers.”
InfoDefense, the Russian FIMI network run by milblogger Yuri Podolyaka, amplified organizers’ claims of 45,000 participants and around 100 demonstrations.
Germany’s distinctive feature lies in the actors being amplified. The Socialist German Workers’ Youth, which helped prepare the strikes, is associated with the German Communist Party. The party supported Russia’s recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” opposed sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and defended an association investigated over alleged support for armed groups in Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk.
Russian state-owned Izvestia also interviewed participants directly at an October 3 demonstration in Berlin, and the FIMI channel Russia Daily Deutsch redistributed their statements to German audiences. FIMI therefore reinforced politically aligned organizers and supplied original reporting.
France shows how amplification developed into explicit encouragement. On September 28, the FIMI channel International Reporters addressed French audiences:
“The Germans have taken to the streets. It’s your turn, young people (and not-so-young people) of France!”
French school blockades were already underway. Node of Time France subsequently acknowledged that protests had continued for more than a week and circulated a national high-school students’ union’s call for nationwide school blockades through Izvestia coverage. On October 3, InfoDefense France published the October 6 mobilization date, participating unions, a strike notice, and planned rallies in Lorient and Vannes, ahead of the action but after local organizations had announced it.
Original content went further. RT France advocated “a massive, global popular mobilization” and declared:
“The enemy is not somewhere far away in the East. It is in power. In France itself.”
After reporting a school fire, the FIMI channel Gavroche asked:
“Why not all go together to the Ministry of Education and set it on fire?”
Across the two cases, FIMI appears not only as a system for exploiting protests retrospectively, but also as an information infrastructure that operates while mobilization is still developing: it circulates information about the movement’s actors, narratives, and forthcoming actions and, in the clearest French example, explicitly encourages their replication across borders.
The Blurred Line Between Amplification and Interference
The information pathway can be traced back to May and June through Junge Welt, a German Marxist daily with sustained editorial access to people involved in the School Strike Against Conscription (Schulstreik gegen Wehrpflicht), a nationwide youth movement opposing conscription and German rearmament. The movement emerged (1) in late 2025 in opposition (2) to Germany’s new Military Service Modernization Act (3) (Wehrdienstmodernisierungsgesetz), which introduced a new military-service system based initially on voluntary recruitment while creating mechanisms for compulsory service if recruitment targets are not met.
Its first nationwide school strike took place on December 5, 2025, as the Bundestag approved the legislation, with demonstrations organized in around 90 cities. Further nationwide school strikes followed in 2026, before the movement announced another nationwide action for September 25.
Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has classified Junge Welt as part of the country’s left-wing extremist milieu (4) since at least 2018, (5) a classification the newspaper disputes. (6)
In May, InfoDefense, the Russian FIMI propaganda network run by milblogger Yuri Podolyaka, directly cited (9) the newspaper. In June, a Junge Welt commentary by Reinhard Lauterbach, the newspaper’s long-time correspondent covering Russia and the post-Soviet region, entered two interconnected FIMI distribution pathways: the German-language FIMI channel Node of Time DE circulated (10) it directly, while the Russian state-media program Solovyov Live amplified (11) the same article before it was republished (12) by InfoDefense.
Lauterbach wrote that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “uses a tactic toward Belarus reminiscent of the Third Reich,” comparing Kyiv’s demands toward Belarus to Nazi Germany’s escalating demands toward Czechoslovakia and Poland before the Second World War.
Russian state-controlled RT DE was also circulating information about forthcoming protests months before the September demonstrations. On May 6, two days before the nationwide school strike scheduled for May 8, RT DE published (13) the date, slogans, and details of planned demonstrations in 79 German cities, while presenting the organizers sympathetically and criticizing German media coverage of the movement.
The organizers had already announced the protest in April, (14) and RT DE explicitly referred to their initiative. This was therefore pre-event amplification of an existing mobilization rather than an original announcement.
The FIMI ecosystem was also amplifying narratives around the movement itself. On June 20, the German-language FIMI channel Medienzensur circulated (15) an article from Anti-Spiegel, a German-language FIMI outlet run from Russia by Thomas Röper and targeting German audiences.
Röper is a sanctioned (16) German pro-Kremlin propagandist (17) based in St. Petersburg who has appeared in Russian state media, collaborated with RT DE, and participated as an ostensible international observer in Russia’s 2022 occupation “referendum” in the occupied Kherson region. The Anti-Spiegel article portrayed (18) German domestic-intelligence scrutiny of the school-strike movement as political repression:
“The German domestic intelligence service is targeting students because of the school-strike movement.”
By July, Junge Welt was also providing recurring access to people involved in the School Strike Against Conscription. On July 17, it interviewed (19) Phil Werring, a 17-year-old student from Münster involved in the movement’s press work, immediately before a national organizing conference in Essen. Werring described committees from across Germany meeting to share experiences, hold workshops on organizing strikes and committee work, and decide on the movement’s next nationwide action.
On July 23, Junge Welt interviewed (20) Bela Breitner, a spokesperson and organizer of the School Strike Against Conscription, who announced the next nationwide strike for September 25. A further interview with Breitner in August discussed (21) plans to expand subsequent strikes and the movement’s participation in wider peace demonstrations on September 1 and October 3. Immediately before the September strike, Junge Welt again reported (22) on preparations for demonstrations in more than 100 German cities.
The international dimension of the movement was also visible in Russian state-media coverage before the September demonstrations. On September 5, RT DE reported (23) that German school-strike committees were working with youth organizations from France, Spain, Britain, and Italy to organize a Europe-wide antiwar school strike for November 20. The report concerned a separate planned mobilization rather than the French school blockades that emerged later in September. Nevertheless, it shows that Russian state media were already circulating information about cross-border youth protest initiatives before the September 28 appeal by FIMI channel International Reporters.
By September, German-language FIMI channels were also advertising concrete information about forthcoming protests. On September 23, another German-language FIMI channel, Nachhall von Helgoland, published (24) details of the forthcoming action:
“For September 25, another nationwide school strike has been announced. In more than 100 cities, students plan to demonstrate against conscription and military-fitness examinations.”
The movement, however, had already announced the September 25 action publicly in July. (25) Nachhall von Helgoland was therefore amplifying an independently organized mobilization rather than originating the call. The nationwide strike took place two days later.
On September 26, the German-language FIMI channel Geopolitik (26) circulated Junge Welt’s reporting (27) on the school strike and embedded it in its existing collections on “Rearmament and militarization,” “Military-industrial complex in Germany,” “The US and Europe’s war against Russia,” “NATO military alliance,” and “Germany as a vassal state.” This placed the anti-conscription protests within a broader FIMI narrative portraying German rearmament and NATO military preparations as part of an escalating confrontation with Russia. Anti-Spiegel similarly (28) claimed that
“NATO’s planning for a war with Russia is far advanced and has been pursued systematically for years.”
The Geopolitik package also included a Junge Welt commentary (29) describing NATO’s eastern flank through the historically loaded metaphor of a new German “Eastern Front.” In addition, Geopolitik incorporated Röper’s TASS-based Anti-Spiegel material (30) into the package (31) of suggested reading accompanying its protest coverage, creating a traceable information chain from Russian state media through a German-language FIMI outlet into the information environment surrounding the anti-conscription protests.
Node of Time DE separately amplified (32) the September demonstrations through statements, attributed to protest participants, portraying conscription as preparation for war and rearmament as coming at the expense of young Germans:
“We, the youth, don’t want to meet our end in trenches for Merz, Pistorius, and all the other warmongers. We don’t want to continue studying in dilapidated schools because the money needed for repairs has already been spent on new tanks.”
The same post rejected the idea of Russia as the principal threat: “I am more afraid of Ursula von der Leyen, Merz, Kiesewetter, and Strack-Zimmermann than of any Russian president. I am not afraid that Russia will attack us.”
On September 26, InfoDefense itself amplified (33) organizers’ claims of 45,000 participants and around 100 demonstrations, together with slogans including “Their wars – without us!” and “Students against conscription!”
The protest environment also overlapped with organizations linked to Germany’s communist movement. The Socialist German Workers’ Youth (Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterjugend), the youth organization associated with the German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei), was involved in the school-strike mobilization from its early stages. In a January 2026 interview with Junge Welt, its chair, Andrea Hornung, said that the organization had worked intensively on preparations for the school strikes. (34)
This overlap remained visible in October, when Junge Welt reported that members of both organizations had taken part, alongside representatives of the School Strike Against Conscription, in anti-conscription and anti-rearmament events in Berlin. (35)
The German Communist Party supported (36) Russia’s recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” opposed (37) sanctions against Russia and weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and blamed NATO, the EU, and the Ukrainian government for the escalation of the conflict.
In 2025, it also defended (38) Friedensbrücke-Kriegsopferhilfe, a German association investigated (39) by federal prosecutors over alleged support for pro-Russian militias in Donetsk and Luhansk that the prosecutors classify as foreign terrorist organizations. The German Communist Party presented the association’s activities as “international solidarity” and demanded an end to Germany’s “war course against Russia.”
On October 3, Ostnews Faktencheck, a German-language FIMI channel, promoted (40) simultaneous anti-rearmament demonstrations in Berlin and Stuttgart as “mass protests against conscription and billions spent on weapons.” It reported that organizers opposed “the growing danger of a direct war with Russia” and the government’s effort to make Germany “war-ready.” The organizers’ own program similarly opposed (41) conscription, arms deliveries, and sanctions, and called for an inclusive European peace order involving Russia.
The same day, Russia Daily Deutsch, another German-language FIMI channel, republished (42) interviews with participants in the Berlin demonstration originally obtained by Russian state-owned Izvestia. One participant said,
“We cannot simply stand by and watch as we are dragged into war,” while another argued that “it is absolutely necessary for the German workers’ movement to act against this.”
Russian state media were thus directly collecting participants’ statements at a German protest, which were then redistributed to German audiences through FIMI channels.
Taken together, these links bring the German case close to the boundary between amplification and interference.
The evidence does not establish the extent to which Russian actors may also have supported the underlying protest infrastructure; that relationship remains an important area for further investigation.
“It’s Your Turn”: From German Protests to French Audiences
The first explicit cross-border appeal appeared on September 28, three days after Germany’s nationwide school strike against conscription. International Reporters, a French-language FIMI channel, presented (43) the German demonstrations as resistance to a war allegedly being prepared by the EU, NATO, and European political elites, before directly addressing its French audience:
“The Germans have taken to the streets. It’s your turn, young people (and not-so-young people) of France!”
The article argued that young people in both countries faced the same threat from European political elites and the military-industrial complex.
The same day, the French-language FIMI channel Node of Time France circulated (44) advance information about a separate French protest. Reporting on a firefighters’ protest camp in central Paris over shortages of personnel, equipment, and funding and over the proposed civil-security reform, the channel announced the next stage one day before it took place:
“On Tuesday, firefighters plan to march through the French capital.”
On September 29, Node of Time France also linked (45) its coverage of the expanding high-school protests to earlier reporting (46) by Russian state-owned Izvestia. The channel wrote that “student demonstrations in France have already been continuing for more than a week” and directed readers to Izvestia’s coverage of a call by the High School Students’ Union (Union syndicale lycéenne) to block schools across France over inadequate funding, overcrowded classrooms, and teacher shortages.
The nationwide blockade call itself had been issued publicly by the French student movement, but its circulation through Izvestia and subsequently Node of Time France created a direct pathway by which mobilization-related information from a French protest movement entered Russian media and was redistributed back into a French-language FIMI environment.
Cross-border protest imagery continued to circulate alongside the French mobilization. On September 30, the French-language FIMI channel Gavroche showed (47) “the mass destruction of military draft notices” by young Germans during demonstrations in more than 100 German cities.
A more explicit example of rhetorical escalation appeared on October 1. After reporting on a fire at the Nelson Mandela High School in Nantes and linking the incident to the broader student protests, the French-language FIMI channel Gavroche rhetorically suggested (48) redirecting such violence toward the authorities:
“Why not all go together to the Ministry of Education and set it on fire?”
The post went beyond amplifying protesters’ grievances or announcing demonstrations by introducing its own suggestion of violent escalation.
On October 1, the Russian propaganda outlet RT France published (49) an article portraying conventional strikes, trade unions, and political parties as incapable of producing meaningful political change and arguing instead for
“a massive, global popular mobilization, this time conscious of the traps that will be set for it.”
The article concluded that anger, despair, and a willingness to fight were already present in French society:
“Only one thing would be missing: the spark.”
By October 3, RT France was circulating (50) precise information about the next stage of the student mobilization. After representatives of the student movement met with the education minister without obtaining what they considered sufficient concessions, RT reported that another nationwide action was being prepared for October 6, quoting Louis Letoublon, vice-president of the student organization Les Lycéens, who said they “have not received concrete commitments.”
RT reported that the movement intended to continue mobilizing in schools and amplified an appeal by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of the left-wing party France Unbowed (La France insoumise), for adults to accompany the demonstrations:
“I invite adults, parents, to put on a helmet or a white armband and surround the demonstrations.”
A different protest environment was simultaneously providing Russian state media with direct access to French political actors. At an October 3 demonstration in Paris organized by the nationalist party The Patriots (Les Patriotes) against French military and financial support for Ukraine, the FIMI channel Le Grand Rééquilibrage amplified (51) an interview with the party’s leader, Florian Philippot, recorded at the protest and originally published by the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik Afrique. Philippot argued that Europeans
“want to stop this war, they want to stop financing it, they want to stop arming [Ukraine],” and contrasted French domestic spending pressures with support for Kyiv: “They found the money for the war and corruption in Ukraine.”
The following day, the FIMI channel International Reporters amplified (52) slogans from the same mobilization, including
“Macron, we will not die for Ukraine,” “Russia is not our enemy,” and “Macron, give the money back! Ursula, give the money back! Zelenskyy, give the money back!”
The information activity intensified immediately before the next nationwide student action. On October 3, three days before the planned October 6 nationwide student mobilization described as “Act 3” of the movement, InfoDefense France, part of the Russian FIMI propaganda network run by milblogger Yuri Podolyaka, circulated (53) detailed mobilization information. It identified participating student, university, and education unions, reported that a strike notice had been filed, noted support from public-sector workers, and named planned rallies in Lorient and Vannes. The channel told readers that
“the student unions have called for the mobilization to continue peacefully and announced a major nationwide day of action for Tuesday, October 6,” adding that education unions were urging their members to participate, “including through strike action.”
On October 4, RT France explicitly incorporated allegations of Russian interference into its interpretation of the student unrest in an opinion article by Karine Bechet-Golovko. In the article, she argued (54) that French authorities were using accusations of Russian involvement to externalize responsibility for domestic discontent:
“An enemy is useful for that: to blame for every wrong, to silence all internal dissent, and to justify every political excess,” concluding: “The enemy is not somewhere far away in the East. It is in power. In France itself.”
Bechet-Golovko is a regular RT contributor who has also worked (55) as a visiting professor at Moscow State University. In her capacity as president of Comitas Gentium, she participated (56) in the 2026 launch of an International Youth Center at the Russian House in Paris. The event also featured representatives of the organizing structures of Russia’s World Youth Festival and a welcome address from a Russian Foreign Ministry official who also chairs a commission of the Public Council of Rossotrudnichestvo.
On the same day, the FIMI channel Le Grand Rééquilibrage told (57) its audience that hundreds of high schools remained closed “ahead of a new day of student mobilization.” RT France likewise disseminated (58) the October 6 date, the participating student and trade-union organizations, and the expansion of the protest into a broader cross-sector action, while Gavroche warned (59) that
“Tuesday could prove more difficult, with a new student mobilization that several trade unions are calling on their members to support.”
Gavroche added a more explicitly political interpretation:
“This is our authorities’ greatest fear for the future: an uncontrollable young generation.”
Pravda FR, a French-language branch of the multilingual Pravda (Portal Kombat) network, featured (60) a Sputnik Afrique segment describing France as facing a “perfect storm” of social discontent, restrictions imposed by the authorities, and “billions wasted on Ukraine.”
The segment included Bertrand Scholler, a regular Sputnik Afrique contributor, (61) who presented the student mobilization as part of a crisis that has been accumulating since the Yellow Vests movement:
“People are suffering; they have no prospects. Children tell themselves that social mobility no longer exists: I go to school, but I have no prospects.”
Concrete grievances over schools, staffing, and resources were thus incorporated into a wider FIMI narrative connecting youth protest to political paralysis, declining faith in elections, social deterioration, and French spending on Ukraine.
As protest becomes an ongoing process rather than a single event, the distinction between amplification and mobilization begins to narrow.
The significance lies not in proving that FIMI actors created the protests, but in showing how FIMI infrastructure can attach itself to an existing mobilization and begin functioning as part of the information environment through which that mobilization continues.
