Eichwede questions threats Ukraine, elections and China

Oct 5

In Eichwede’s complete first-round slot, Jäger calls Ukraine support a core German interest and rejects the idea that ending that war would end Russia’s broader revisionist confrontation. He outlines conditional security, instability, refugee and cost consequences of a Ukrainian defeat. Selen says Russian actors including Storm-1516 and Matryoshka monitored and manipulated state and local electoral discourse, discredited people and election processes, and used AI, bots and wider dissemination ecosystems; he describes faster detection as necessary. Responding to questions about Chinese cars and connected products, he warns of personal-data leakage, state access, misuse and possible shutdown risks, without proving that particular products are spies. He also describes Chinese cyber and insider espionage risks to research, urges protection of critical knowledge and cooperation with research institutions, and explicitly rejects abandoning cooperation altogether.

At the hearing Selen says Russian actors including Storm-1516 and Matryoshka manipulated German state and local electoral discourse through targeted discrediting, election-process doubts, AI, bots and extensive dissemination networks. Challenged by Eichwede and von Notz, he says destabilization reaches receptive audiences and acknowledges that traditional agency and media communication fails to reach some social-media users. He urges wider dissemination and warns that AI-mediated information gathering could deepen the gap. He says threat reports already exist; von Notz also raises platform ownership and partisan messages. Neither speaker establishes a quantified causal effect on a particular election result.