Germany, March 2022: attacks on shops, a school and a church, all connected to Russia

Within a fortnight of 24 February 2022, businesses and institutions in Germany were attacked because of their connection to Russia. By 27 February 2022 a restaurant in Baden-Württemberg had declared that visitors holding Russian passports were unwelcome. By 3 March the window of a Russian-Polish supermarket in Oberhausen had been smashed and white paint smeared on its façade. A doctor at the LMU Klinikum in Munich announced that she would no longer treat Russian outpatients; the hospital distanced itself on 2 March, calling it a single, personal opinion. On 4 March a Georgian-Armenian restaurant in Bremen was attacked in its Google reviews. According to a report of 5 March, a Russian restaurant in Berlin-Mitte had been receiving threatening e-mails and calls since the war began; one of the e-mails read "We will burn you".

On 11 March 2022 the German-Russian Lomonossow school in Berlin-Marzahn was set on fire. On 15 March glass bottles were thrown at the Russian Orthodox church in Berlin-Charlottenburg, damaging three windows. By 15 March a schoolchild in Hövelhof had been verbally attacked with ethnic slurs by a child from a parallel class, and by 19 March the Rostock police had recorded two war-related attacks of criminal relevance, both involving altercations, insults and threats and one of them bodily harm as well.

The pattern reached beyond the shopfront. In a guest article that Cicero dated 8 March 2022, the author describes how Deutsche Bank restricted, without warning, the accounts of her own family, Russian citizens living in Germany: on 2 March no money could be paid into her father's account, though withdrawals were still possible. She writes that, going by the replies to her own social-media post about it, the bank had at first blocked incoming payments for many customers with Russian citizenship. By 11 March the Berlin police had registered about 100 attacks on people from the post-Soviet region in that city alone - damage to property, threats and insults, directed at buildings, Russian organisations, media and private individuals. By mid-April the Bundeskriminalamt had counted more than 1,700 war-related offences nationwide, about 200 a week, a figure it gave to Human Rights Watch along with the categories: insults, threats, physical assault and property damage.

Human Rights Watch recorded some of the same incidents in June 2022 and added others: desecrated memorials - the Nordkurier report it links describes a Soviet memorial in Neubrandenburg sprayed with slogans in Ukrainian and a plaque for concentration-camp victims daubed with Nazi symbols - and the bullying of Russian-speaking children in schools. It also recorded one account in detail. A Russian woman it calls Anna, forty years old and seventeen years resident in Germany, was threatened in a Berlin park in late April 2022 while speaking Russian.

Two of the sources that document these attacks, Human Rights Watch and the Mediendienst Integration expertise, also document their exaggeration, and they do so in the same breath. In their 2023 expertise for Mediendienst Integration, Jannis Panagiotidis and Hans-Christian Petersen put it in one sentence: hostilities against Russian-speaking people in Germany are real, but were also instrumentalised. In March 2022 the pro-Russian influencer Alina Lipp spread a video claiming that a sixteen-year-old Russian-German had been beaten to death by a mob of Ukrainian refugees in Euskirchen. It went viral and was shown to be false; Correctiv published its account on 8 April 2022.

The Federal Government rejects the word usually attached to these events. In its answer of 9 July 2026 it states that the Russian leadership regularly instrumentalises the Federal Government's own statements for propaganda, disinformation and defamation campaigns, repeatedly raising the unfounded accusation of supposed "Russophobie", and that the Federal Government does not adopt the term and expressly rejects such accusations.

The credible German sources on these incidents do not reach for the 1933 boycott of Jewish shops to describe them. They place them in a different tradition, which they name: antislawischer Rassismus, the racism directed at Slavs that runs through Generalplan Ost, the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war and the forced labour of the Ostarbeiter. Panagiotidis and Petersen add a point that complicates the label itself: only about a third of the roughly four million post-Soviet migrants in Germany came from the Russian Federation, and a further third from Kazakhstan, so "Russian" is in large part an ascription by others.