This is stated in an investigation by Deutsche Welle's fact-checking desk, Ukrinform reports.
"The DW fact-checking team counted more than 180 fake posts on the X, Bluesky, and TikTok platforms ahead of the regional elections," the publication says.
Journalists link the identified materials to the Russian influence operation "Matryoshka," also known as Overload. The data on them was collected by the anonymous research collective Antibot4Navalny, which tracks Russian disinformation campaigns online.
Deutsche Welle received the posts, which were published starting on June 24. According to the journalists' observations, the disinformers posted them only on working days.
The fakes targeted candidates in the elections to the state parliaments of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the elections to the Berlin House of Representatives, and local elections in Lower Saxony. All of the votes are scheduled to take place in September.
According to the investigation, the fakes were directed against representatives of all major political forces except the far-right Alternative for Germany and the left-populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.
Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noted that the narratives being spread are pro-Russian, anti-German, and anti-European in nature.
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Researchers identified two main directions of the campaign. The first is discrediting candidates through fabricated accusations of corruption, drug use, murder, and sexual scandals.
In one AI-generated video, Berlin's governing mayor Kai Wegner was falsely accused of murdering a professional tennis player. However, police said that no such murder had taken place and that no investigation against Wegner was underway.
The second direction of the campaign aims to intensify tensions between residents of eastern and western Germany.
In one fake video allegedly from Eurostat, it was claimed that most residents of western regions supposedly considered German reunification a "historical mistake." At the same time, Eurostat stated that it had not created the video and had not conducted such a survey.
Other fakes concerned alleged discrimination against eastern Germans, a possible new division of the country in 2030, and plans to build a new Berlin Wall.
A direct link between the operation and the Russian state has not yet been conclusively proven. At the same time, the OSINT group Gnida Project linked "Matryoshka" technically and substantively to the Storm-1516 operation, which, according to researchers, is controlled by Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU.
Experts currently assess the campaign's effectiveness as limited. Although some posts receive more than 100,000 views, they have little organic interaction or commentary, suggesting artificially boosted reach.
As Ukrinform reported, Russia is intensifying hybrid attacks against Poland, combining cyberattacks on critical infrastructure with large-scale disinformation and cyberespionage campaigns.