Friday afternoon in Düsseldorf, the man named Alexander Dobrindt stood next to Herbert Reul and issued his usual label:
Klimaextremismus. Einzeltäter.
Dobrindt added that a final assessment was not yet possible, and then he delivered one anyway to emphasize how little he bothers to think. The burden then falls on everyone else to prove his accusation wrong, since he offers nothing to prove it right.
That’s a classic bad-faith move, the kind Sartre described in 1946, writing about French anti-semites: assert freely, because you never intended to be bound by your own words.
Three days earlier roughly twenty home-built rockets had been staked into the ground around the substation at Jänschwalde, wired to carry conductive cable into the lines. One flew and shorted a line. Bergheim the same night, same method, blocks at Niederaußem knocked offline. Dormagen on Thursday, launchers found before they fired. Weisweiler and Eschweiler being combed on Friday. The suspect was on foot somewhere near the Hambacher Forst. His truck had been stormed. His flat had been searched and sprengstoffverdächtige Gegenstände carried out of it. Reul told the public the man posed no danger.
Reul also said something Dobrindt did not. When someone signs a letter, that does not make him the responsible party. The NRW minister who actually runs the manhunt left the question open. The federal minister who runs the Verfassungsschutz closed it in a hurry.
The Record
This Dobrindt habit shows a pattern, and Germans need to talk about it sooner rather than later. Every row below is documented, most of it by his own ministry.
| Event | Dobrindt’s move |
|---|---|
| 2013 to 2017. Federal transport and digital minister, 50 Mbit/s for all by 2018 promised | Fail. Backed copper vectoring over fiber, disbursed under 2% of allocated broadband funds, Germany sank to the bottom of European fiber rankings |
| Jun 2025. Verfassungsschutzbericht 2024 press conference | Inflate. Announced violence-oriented left extremists “rise significantly” to 11,200. Prior year: 11,200. The chart in his hand showed flat bars |
| Jun 2025. Same press conference, slides | Inflate. Right-wing potential charted on a 0 to 60,000 axis, left-wing potential on a 0 to 40,000 axis, so 2.7% growth looked like 25% growth |
| Jun 2025. Same report, preface | Erase. Faeser’s 2023 finding that right-wing extremism is the greatest extremist threat deleted, while right-wing potential rose 25% to 50,250 and right-wing violent crime rose 47%. Left-wing violence fell 26.8%. No justification given |
| Sep 2025. BfV, BKA, BND and BAMAD joint warning on Russian Wegwerf-Agenten recruited online for arson against energy, rail, transport and logistics | Erase. His own agencies named the commissioning state and the target list. His public attribution for attacks on that target list stayed on the left |
| Sep 2025. Johannisthal, two pylons, ~50,000 households dark for 60 hours | Rule. Left-extremist within the hour, Vulkangruppe accepted as domestic. Fifteen years under that banner, zero convictions |
| Jan 2026. Lichterfelde cable bridge, ~45,000 households without heat in a freeze | Rule. Told ZDF there were “no indications” of Russia before the investigation concluded |
| Jan 2026. Same case, response | Aim. Announced expanded surveillance of the linksextreme Szene only, vowed to “hit back” at left extremists |
| Jun 2026. Reutlingen substation, ~30,000 without power, three burn points, cut fence | Rule. Anonymous Sicherheitskreise fed “links” to dpa within hours while the police at the lectern said every direction was open, technical fault included |
| Jul 2026. Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 press release | Inflate. Cited the January Berlin fires as proof of “the perfidious methods of violent left extremists”. The case had a claim letter and an open investigation. He counted it as evidence. Same release: right-wing potential up another 17% to 58,700, violent right-wing potential 15,600 against 11,600 on the left |
| Jul 2026. BMI 691-page Referentenentwurf | Aim. Federal counterintelligence powers pointed at domestic political groups, powers asserted first, threat validation and review treated as friction |
| Jul 2026. CSD Tiergarten van attack, 25 July | Fail. Attacker well known to authorities, attack preventable |
| Sep 2026. Jänschwalde, Bergheim, Dormagen, suspect at large | Rule. Named “Klimaextremismus” on day three while the investigation still listed foreign state involvement as an open direction |
Four infrastructure attacks in twelve months?
Four verdicts before evidence.
Every verdict pointed the same way without evidence, and some with evidence against the early verdict.
What Friday Did Not Explain
Set the man’s letter aside for a moment and look at the operation. The authorities themselves told the taz that Jänschwalde required considerable technical know-how and several days of preparation at the site. Then the same method appeared 550 kilometers away in Bergheim the same night, then Dormagen two days later, with police deployments in Sachsen near Spremberg and a false alarm in Niedersachsen.
Brandenburg’s interior minister Jan Redmann said after the second attack it could be a coordinated assault on the energy supply and announced a security center. The CDU’s own interior spokesman Alexander Throm said on Wednesday the clustering of attacks right before the Landtagswahlen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin was extremely conspicuous and the goal was clearly to unsettle the population.
The taz reached the obvious conclusion on Wednesday: the pattern argued against the Vulkangruppe and for state commissioning (Russia, duh). The name never fit for what it claimed, and I have explained in detail how it has all the hallmarks of Russia, but taz still got there on operational grounds alone
Then on Friday a 48-year-old from Gevelsberg appeared, and Dobrindt had his Einzeltäter.
Here is what the archive of the last twelve months says about that. In September 2025 four federal agencies, two of them under Dobrindt, published a template.
Russian services recruit untrained locals through messenger apps, pay them small sums, hand them a task and a cover story, and let them be caught.
The recruit often never learns who paid. The February 2025 Be Greener operation was the proof of concept on German soil: more than 270 vehicles vandalized by FSB-recruited hands, framed as climate activism, timed to an election. False-flag environmentalism has already been run in Germany, in the open, and attributed by German investigators.
Hello, is this thing on?
A lone climate actor and a disposable recruit handed a climate cover story write identical letters. Both include the ideology. Both include the method. This one included the Klarname and the home address, which a cell protects and an asset gets exposed. The letter described the rockets in detail, which is what a cell hides and a seeding operation publishes. None of that proves a handler. All of it means the discriminator is the arrest and the phone.
Dobrindt ruled before either existed.
The timing sits on top. Within days of Dobrindt and Wadephul standing at a podium to formally attribute the Leipzig airport drone to Russia, the grid was hit in two Länder. Dobrindt can say Russia when the target is a Ukrainian An-124 and a provider’s cell-tower logs hold him accountable (curses, foiled by evidence). When the target is a German coal plant, suddenly a basic standard of proof disappears.
Copperhead
Germans have a name for this minister from his last job. Münchhausen of broadband. As federal transport and digital minister he promised 50 Mbit/s for everyone by 2018, disbursed under two percent of the money, and backed Deutsche Telekom’s vectoring, which squeezed more signal out of the existing copper instead of laying glass.
Germany finished at the bottom of Europe on fiber, because of how Dobrindt assessed risk. He literally ran the country into far greater risk.
Every engineer in the country told him copper was the wrong answer. It was the answer that protected someone other than the public, so he fumbled and lost the ball, and called that his analysis. Imagine the Nationalelf (German national team) with a player constantly kicking the ball into his own goal and then pointing at a backwards scoreboard for a pay raise.
That decision rule did not change when the portfolio did. Threat attribution is infrastructure risk management with a different unit of measure. The left is copper. It is the incumbent narrative of his party, the one that keeps CSU voters from drifting to a party further right, the one that costs nothing to say and requires no response from the federal government beyond a press conference and a surveillance expansion. Russia is fiber. It is expensive, it is the correct answer, and saying it out loud obliges a state to act.
Now look at what runs on the fiber he declined to build. Substation monitoring. Drone detection at Leipzig, which failed, and the Funkzellenabfrage that had to substitute for it afterward. The KRITIS-Dachgesetz that Reul was defending on ZDF the same week. The 360-Grad-Sicherheitszentrum Redmann promised Brandenburg. All of it is telemetry, and telemetry travels on the network Dobrindt starved for four years so that copper wouldn’t be upgraded.
Let me get technical for a minute, because I need Germans to understand what Russia gets from Dobrindt’s fiber delay. It’s specific and it matters.
Copper is simple metal, which means a simple clamp can tap into it without a break and without a trace. This is old craft the Russians know well. From 1971 the US Navy kept an inductive pod on a Soviet copper cable in the Sea of Okhotsk for a decade, no cut, no loss, nothing Moscow could measure, and it ended only because a traitor took money to expose the American methods. Fiber runs on light a network can meter, so a tap is something different the operator can detect, while a silent copper clamp has no fiber equivalent.
What it means is Dobrindt’s infrastructure vectoring decision was far worse than just forcing Germany to stew in slow and vulnerable copper. Telekom’s own count for the Nahbereich build alone is over 30,000 powered, unattended cabinets exposed to adversaries who walk the public pavement, converting light back to copper behind a standard industry key. A passive fiber network would have put no powered electronics on the street at all, only unpowered splitter cabinets with nothing in them that a cheap Russian clamp can read.
The Germans look like technologically backward fools. They should have deployed a passive fiber network for many reasons, not least of all because incumbents being incumbents means the country is mis-aligned with basic national security requiring technology changes. You don’t go into a “grey zone” hybrid war with Russia by leaving everyone exposed.
Dobrindt drove a hard line to keep the medium that taps silently with the worst possible architecture, multiplying the exposed areas to break privacy. His failure to deploy the fiber, undermining national security, has turned now into a growing failure on everything that runs on the delayed fiber.
American had a word for this kind of politician during the Slaveholder Rebellion.
Copperheads.
They were the politicians who wore the Union’s colors, sat in Union legislatures, and spent their time insisting the real enemy was abolitionists ending slavery, despite an enemy actually shooting at them in the field to preserve and expand slavery.
It’s the English word for a snake that strikes without any rattle, and also because of the copper coin some of them wore as a badge. Like how Dobrindt keeps showing up in the headlines, they were loyal to their right-wing backward-thinking party, and yet tried to say that meant loyalty to the country. The Copperheads were defenders of an old order, refusing to admit the threat had changed, and they cost their country dearly.
A minister who looked at copper and glass and chose copper? Come on. Who looked at 11,200 violent left extremists one year and 11,200 the next and called that a significant rise. Are you kidding me? The guy who looked at Roman naming conventions, Russian grammar, and a GRU contractor called Vulkan and couldn’t figure out Vulkangruppe is about as German as a bear speaking Russian? Who looked at twenty rockets across two Länder, a suspect on the run, and an open foreign-state line of inquiry, and saw a single climate activist? Jeezus. How is this guy still in office? Have the Germans no shame? Wait, I think we know that answer.
Reul said a name on the letter does not make that one man responsible. The name on the ministry should.
