German Sabotage Attacks on Power Substations Wrongly Blamed on Putin, Freitag Analysis Argues

A Freitag article examines how a series of minor, largely ineffective sabotage attempts on German transformer substations was quickly attributed to Russia, when the suspected perpetrator is reportedly a German man in his late forties linked to the radical environmental scene. The piece, published in early September, describes how the attacks were mentally slotted into an association chain of "sabotage – Russia – we are at war," a framing reinforced by a drone incident at Leipzig Airport and the discovery of two handguns in a forest near Berlin. According to the article, the initially unblurred wanted images showed a seemingly sympathetic-looking suspect. The text invokes the psychological phenomenon that caused observers to stare only toward Moscow, asking "Is it what it looks like?" The author, Velten Schäfer, argues that a well-known cognitive effect explains the reflexive suspicion directed at Russia despite evidence pointing to a domestic perpetrator from the climate movement. The full analysis appears in the current issue of Der Freitag.