A member of the Hamburg city assembly from Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, Robert Risch, attended a far-right forum in Russia this month that drew extreme right-wing politicians from several countries, an examination of images from the conference shows.
A former AfD member who was ousted from the Hamburg assembly also attended the conference in St. Petersburg, whose organizers included Konstantin Malofeyev, a Kremlin-connected tycoon who champions Russian imperialism and is under Western sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Billed as the founding conference of an “international league of anti-globalists’ called Paladins, the September 12 forum in St. Petersburg’s ornate, Imperial-era Mariinsky Palace was attended by far-right politicians from nations including France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and South Africa.
Faces of some of the attendees were blurred in a number of published photos from the forum, including one that shows a man seated at a conference table behind a placard that indicates he is from Germany. But photos of the same attendees were published elsewhere without blurring.
RFE/RL’s Russian Service showed a photograph of a German delegate to Sergej Meier, a researcher and open-source investigator at the German channel RTL who identified the subject as Risch. An Amazon facial recognition program confirmed the likeness.
The AfD, which posted its best-ever parliamentary election result in February, winning nearly 21 percent, has been seeking to soften its image.
In May, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the party as an extremist entity that threatens democracy, a decision the party is trying to overturn.
Risch did not respond to e-mailed questions from RFE/RL, and the AfD did not respond to a letter sent to its Berlin office seeking comment.
An examination of images from the conference and social media shows that another attendee was Olga Petersen, who was ousted from the AfD and from the Hamburg assembly in 2024. In March of that year, she acted as an observer at the election in which President Vladimir Putin secured a new term, and reportedly called the vote “open, democratic, and free.”
In February, Petersen, who was born in Russia and currently lives there, posted photos showing her with Russian soldiers in a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine.
Malofeyev has been under Western sanctions since 2014 for his role in fomenting uprisings in parts of southern and eastern Ukraine and facilitating Russia's occupation of Ukraine's Crimea region. He is also the target of an international arrest warrant on suspicion of creating and financing illegal paramilitary formations.
Malofeyev’s Tsargrad media network was instrumental in promoting the so-called Novorossia project to justify Russia’s land grabs in Ukraine. It served as a major platform for disseminating and popularizing the ideas of the pro-Kremlin, far-right ideologist Aleksandr Dugin, who is shown sitting next to Malofeyev in a photo of the conference.
