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In the program "phoenix persönlich" Jörg Thadeusz speaks with the former German ambassador to Poland Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven about his interest in Russia, his experiences as a diplomat, about Vladimir Putin and about Russia's hybrid war. The former diplomat Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven warns of hybrid attacks by Russia. Germany is particularly in the crosshairs because "Germany is the second largest military supporter of Ukraine, because Germany is generally an influential country in the EU and NATO, but on the other hand it offers a lot of fertile ground for influence and manipulation from Russia, such as through the tradition of the peace movement or the "Russia understanders" in Germany." It is a very broad-based aggression of one country against another country, "below the threshold of a traditional war," says Freytag von Loringhoven. This could be, for example, attacks on critical infrastructure, attempts to manipulate elections or debates or "even murder." "So, you could perhaps call it a whole lot of different pinpricks, which ultimately serve overarching goals, namely to intimidate us, confuse us, undermine trust in our democracy and, of course, very specifically, to undermine solidarity with Ukraine." This "shadow war" or hybrid war waged by Russia in Germany, Freytag von Loringhoven continued, is "extremely diffuse and is not called a shadow war for nothing, because you are not supposed to really perceive and see it, you have to make a lot of effort to decipher it all." There is no "general awareness" of this threat in Germany: "We underestimate it and are not well enough positioned to understand it and defend ourselves." The subject of Russia has always fascinated him, explains Freytag von Loringhoven, who has worked at the German embassy in Moscow, among other places. "Personally, it started for me when I joined the Foreign Service in 1986, then came the perestroika phase and then German reunification. And Gorbachev was actually the most important person in international politics at that time.” And he had a “family predisposition” because his ancestors were Baltic Germans and had lived in Estonia, which had long been Russian.