Investigation・ Russian influence in Austria
The Russian-Austrian 'strudel' of influence
For years, Russia successfully influenced Austrian politics, permeating Austrian society, government, and culture. Now, it exemplifies how foreign influence can corrupt a country.
Investigated and written by Agata Pyka and Deniz Dirisu. Edited by Julius E. O. Fintelmann and Viktorya Muradyan. Published on 18 June 2024.
The recent European elections saw massive success for far-right parties. One clear winner among them is the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which placed first with 27% of votes. The party's success is more concerning, given its Moscow connection. In this article, we delve into the Russian-Austrian 'strudel' of influence. We're analysing the insidious weave of Russian propaganda and disinformation that's currently permeating Austrian society and politics.
Russia’s influence and information campaigns in Austria can be classified into three layers. The first layer of the strudel reveals direct ties to Russian governmental structures such as embassies and cultural organisations under the country's foreign ministry. Layer two presents Austrian structures and public figures with strong ties to Russian entities, facilitating economic and information exchanges between the two countries.
The strudel's third layer focuses on direct implications for Austrian politics, showcasing the role of the Freedom Party of Austria and its most prominent politicians in spreading a pro-Russian agenda in the Central European country.
Layer 1: The Russian core
Due to Austria’s neutrality, Russia saw a great opportunity to extend a broad network of institutions spreading pro-Russian narratives in the Central European country. We identified five of them: the Russian House, Suvorov Institute, KSORS, Friends of Crimea, and the Sochi Dialogue Forum. All these organisations are active in Austria and have clear ties to the Kremlin.
Russia exerts soft power influence primarily through its controversial sanctioned agency, Rossotrudnichestvo (Russian Cooperation Agency). Responsible for the Russian state’s cultural exchange programmes, the agency runs the various Russian Houses of Science and Culture in cities throughout the world. Some of them, unsurprisingly, engage in activities beyond a purely cultural scope.
Vienna’s Russian House appears to be less overtly political. Their events range from a “competition aimed at the patriotic upbringing of children and youths” to conferences on the plight of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) in the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp. However, their official Facebook page is littered with self-congratulatory posts about delivering “humanitarian aid” to Ukraine. Often, the posts mention aid being delivered to occupied territories in Ukraine's Donbas region, blatantly promoting and validating the annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia.
A particularly revealing post from March 2022, barely two weeks after the full-scale invasion, quotes four European politicians who had come out with statements critical of Ukraine: two from AfD, one from Die Linke in Germany, and one from the French nationalist National Rally party. The statements tread familiar ground – American overlordship, the folly of sanctions, Ukrainian nazis and corruption in Ukraine.
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Despite these controversies, Austria continues to support the Russian House's activities. The Austrian foreign ministry’s press service confirmed recently that the institution is a foundational part of the Russian embassy and is, therefore, allowed to operate in Austria.
Closely affiliated with Rossotrudnichestvo are the Coordination Councils of Russian Compatriots, or KSORS. Through this umbrella structure of civil society organisations and institutions, the Russian state can mobilise its diaspora. KSORS chapters in the United States have engaged in outright political lobbying, while the institution’s Berlin chapter has a former Russian intelligence officer as its representative.
Austria’s KSORS found itself in the headlines in 2022, when Vienna's police attended a seminar organised by them. The seminar was given by Elena Fedchenko, a former anti-Maidan activist, who, despite only having moved there as an adult, portrayed herself as a “Ukrainian from Luhansk”. In the seminar, she spoke about alleged Ukrainian atrocities in Donbas. To illustrate her point, she used a famous fake taken from a film set.
Another institution spreading a pro-Russian agenda is an association under the telling name “Friends of Crimea”. The birth child of the II Yalta International Economic Forum in 2017, a conference held by Russian authorities in occupied Crimea, the association hosts pro-Russian members from various European nations, including Austria.
Several members of the pro-Russian Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) – Detlef Wimmer, Hans-Jörg Jenewein, Axel Kassegger and Barbara Rosenkranz – participated in exactly that conference. Many foreign participants in the forum, including the Austrians, had been attracted to participate by payments conducted by Russian assets in Europe.
Meanwhile, another institution focuses on a less political front, uniting not party leaders but Austrian public intellectuals. Officially registered in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea, the "Suvorov Institute for the Promotion of Austrian-Russian Dialogue" has organised demonstrations in support of Donbas. It is currently led by Alexander Markovics – the founder of the right-wing Identitarian movement who previously unsuccessfully ran in local elections for the FPÖ.
Lastly, during the rapprochement era in the 2010s, a key forum of cooperation was created between Russia and Austria. In June 2018, the Russian-Austrian civil society forum named the "Sochi Dialogue" officially launched in Vienna during a meeting between President Putin and Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen.
Even after the full-scale invasion, the dialogue remains active, evident from the anniversary celebration of the Russian-Austrian Forum “Sochi Dialogue” at the Russian State University for the Humanities on 15 July 2023. Most recently, the Sochi Dialogue Forum organised a concert of jazz pianist Daniil Kramer at the Russian House in Vienna on 25 April 2024.
Layer 2: The connectors
Openly pro-Russian structures such as the Russian House, Suvorov Institute, KSORS, Friends of Crimea and the Sochi Dialogue Forum have penetrated Austrian culture, politics, and economy and have created grounds for a more covert network of influence. Russian presence in Austria through these organisations resulted in the second layer of the strudel of influence: the economic and cultural connectors.
On the European scene, Austria is known for maintaining close relations with Russia – especially economic ones – even during the ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In December 2023, official data showed that 98% of Austria’s natural gas imports came from Russia – up from 80% prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As of the beginning of 2022, 650 Austrian companies had subsidiaries in Russia, with a total investment of €4,6 billion. One of Austria’s largest players, the Raiffeisenbank, is among the companies with close Russian links. Despite promising to abandon its Russia business after facing intense public criticism, Raiffeisenbank advertised 270 new jobs in Russia in April 2024.
These are just a few examples of the Russian-Austrian economic interconnectedness. It's exemplified on a governmental level by Austria’s Economic Chamber (WKO) and its foreign trade promotion office, Advantage Austria, which has multiple times promoted Russian-Austrian business ties after both the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In September 2015, the WKO organised an event titled “Successful in Russia despite sanctions”. Although the content has since been deleted from their website, we retrieved it using webarchive.
The event description reads, “The current tense political situation does not detract from the long-term potential of the Russian market. Russia will remain a very important market due to its size.”
After Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022, the WKO once again demonstrated its sympathies for Moscow when it sent out an invitation to its member enterprises to a cross-country skiing trip in Russia. After quite some public backlash and outrage, the trip was cancelled, but the bitter aftertaste remained.
Meanwhile, in March 2023, Advantage Austria published another guide for doing business with and in Russia, where they recommended “using unorthodox methods” for conducting business operations with the country due to the difficult circumstances, hinting strongly at using informal networks and bribes. The content was deleted on the very same day that the Austrian newspaper Der Standard published an article about it.
The pro-Russian tendencies of Austrian business figures are especially clear in the case of Josef Kaltenegger, an Austrian business owner whose company is mentioned in the Advantage Austria registry. The man recently made a trip to Russia, where, alongside figures such as Putin or his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, he participated in the World Festival of Youth. The Kremlin organised the event to ensure a broad turnout for the March presidential elections – elections where Kaltenegger later served as an observer.
Kaltenegger gave an interview to Russia Today (RT) – Moscow’s propaganda channel banned in Europe – where he praised Moscow and criticised the West. “The problem with [being] European entrepreneur is, if you work with some countries out of Europe and the United States say "we don’t like it", you have trouble,” he told RT, referring to the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and the EU.
After his trip, he wrote extensively about it on his Facebook account and published an opinion piece with Austria’s largest regional newspaper, the Kleine Zeitung.
“The West doesn’t understand the Russian soul by an inch… Or, to put it differently, the train is moving into the future without Europe! We don’t need the West…,” the businessman concluded.
Similar rhetoric is being spread by other Austrian media outlets. One such example is info-DIREKT – an online and print “magazine for patriots” in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the Italian province of South Tyrol.
The magazine is owned partly by Ulrich Püschel (30% of shares) – former office manager of the infrastructure officer Markus Hein (FPÖ), and current director of the health and sports division of the Austrian city of Linz. It spreads subtle pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian rhetoric with articles promoting Austrian neutrality in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war and criticising Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
At the same time, info-DIREKT serves as an advertising platform for the Freedom Party of Austria. The FPÖ regularly places its banners on the magazine’s website, with many of the party’s politicians co-authoring articles and giving interviews.
Layer 3: The party
Beyond the Russian state institutions present in the country and openly pro-Russian individuals operating more indirectly lies the bottom layer of the Russian network in Austria. The cultural and economic influence oozes down into Austrian politics, resulting in a pro-Russian government.
Particularly compromised is the national-conservative Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), as exemplified by the 2019 Ibiza Affair, which caused the collapse of the then-ruling coalition of the ÖVP and FPÖ and the resignation of then-chancellor Sebastian Kurz. A secretly recorded video was published, showing two high-ranking politicians of the right-wing FPÖ – former vice-chancellor of Austria Heinz-Christian Strache, then chairman of the FPÖ, and his deputy Johann Gudenus – meeting with a woman posing as a Russian oligarch’s niece. In the video, the politicians are seen discussing the possibility of buying positive Russian media coverage in exchange for government contracts.
In the current Russo-Austrian espionage affair, FPÖ federal party leader Herbert Kickl was requested to give an account. Kickl, who was interior minister from 2017 to 2019, appeared as a witness in a committee of enquiry dealing with an alleged abuse of power by the social democratic SPÖ and right-wing party FPÖ. Asked about his connections to Moscow, Kickl claimed to have 'no personal connections to Russia at all' in front of the committee.
The credibility of Herbert Kickl's testimony before the investigating committee seems questionable, considering reports in the left-liberal weekly newspaper Falter from March 2023. The paper published an anonymous dossier that indicated Kickl's contacts with the Russian Secret Service during his time in office as interior minister. Kickl was allegedly offered a meeting with influential Russian diplomats and intelligence officers.
Despite Kickl's spokesperson refuting the alleged meeting, in October 2018, Kickl sought to negotiate an "uncomplicated exchange of data and police deployment in each other's countries" with his Russian counterpart in Moscow. This negotiation also included discussions on "forming investigative teams for cross-border cases" and, notably, "ensuring secure communication outside traditional diplomatic channels" as "part of Austria's security strategy". All of this was supposed to be “part of Austria's security strategy“, according to the spokesperson.
Although the FPÖ's overtly pro-Russian stance receded in the public sphere after the party's ousting from the coalition government over the Ibiza affair, the party continues to indirectly and subtly support the pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian stances such as the idea of neutrality, ending the ongoing conflict at all costs, and refraining from providing Kyiv with support.
An analysis of over 130 press releases issued by the FPÖ's parliamentary club during the first year of the Ukraine war revealed that almost 60% contained criticism of the EU sanctions imposed on Russia. Almost as much criticism was directed at Ukraine and its leadership.
On its parliamentary website, the party describes the war as an “economic war” led by the USA and calls for an immediate end to Austria's “neutrality-destroying and economically ruinous” sanctions policy against Russia. This narrative is in line with the country’s pro-Russian business strategy described in Layer 2 and much to the delight of the Russian institutions described in Layer 1.
This investigation was conducted in cooperation with OSINT for Ukraine, a non-profit organisation specialising in open-source intelligence and international justice.
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This article has been produced with the support of Journalismfund Europe.
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