Last week, Stephan Protschka, a member of Parliament for the far-right party Alternative for Germany, took to Facebook and Telegram to share a sensationalist article. The country’s Green Party, it claimed, was conspiring with the Ukrainian government to recruit migrants to stage terrorist attacks — and blame his party.

As intended, the post enraged Mr. Protschka’s followers. “People wake up,” one of them replied on Facebook. “This is criminal.”

The article was, in fact, part of a torrent of Russian disinformation that has flooded Europe’s biggest economic and diplomatic power ahead of its federal election on Feb. 23.

As the vote approaches, Russian influence campaigns have propagated wild claims about sexual, financial and criminal scandals involving German politicians, playing on social and political tensions that have divided the country, according to researchers who track disinformation and foreign influence operations.

The claims have appeared in fake news outlets and in videos that have been altered by artificial intelligence. They have been spread by an army of bot accounts on social media platforms like X, Facebook, Telegram and, in a new development, Bluesky.

The goal, according to the researchers and Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, is to undermine trust in mainstream parties and media and to bolster Germany’s far right, led by the Alternative for Germany, known as AfD.

Aiming at the same target is the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. His public support of the Alternative for Germany on X, the social media network he owns, has aligned with Russia’s strategic objective to destabilize Western democracies and support for Ukraine.

“We’re now dealing with a dual front,” said Sasha Havlicek, chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization that on Thursday released a report about the Russian disinformation campaign on X.

“Between Musk’s overt and the Kremlin’s covert operations,” she said, “it is clear from the content that there’s mutual reinforcement there.”

Targeting Germany

Germany’s election has become the latest battleground in Russia’s influence campaigns. The Kremlin hopes the outcome of the contest, called ahead of schedule after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition collapsed late last year, could erode support in Europe for Ukraine, where Russian invaders are grinding down the country’s defenses after three years of war.

Mr. Musk, for his part, appears to have done little to curtail Russian bots promoting the AfD on his platform. Instead, he has told his 217 million-strong audience on X that the party is the country’s last hope.

In January, Mr. Musk interviewed the party’s leading candidate, Alice Weidel, for 75 minutes on X, the same platform he gave Donald J. Trump during his run for office last August. Addressing the party’s conference by video link last month, he said it had the support of the Trump administration.

Russia’s propagandists have welcomed the convergence and sought to exploit it. Mr. Musk’s posts on X have been spread by bot accounts operated by a Russian influence operation known as Doppelgänger, according to CeMAS, an organization that tracks German online extremism. X did not respond to a question about the Russian activity.

A fake news maven

In Germany, Russia is employing tactics it has honed in France, Moldova, Georgia, the United States and other countries that have recently held elections, according to disinformation researchers including from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, CeMAS and Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company based in Massachusetts.

One key player is a former sheriff’s deputy from Florida, John Mark Dougan, who received political asylum and eventually citizenship in Moscow. Having previously built a network of more than 160 fake news websites that pushed Kremlin propaganda in the United States, Britain and France, he has now turned his attention to Germany.

Nine days after the snap election was announced on Nov. 12, Mr. Dougan began registering dozens of fake German news sites, according to a report by NewsGuard, a company that tracks online disinformation, and Correctiv, a nonprofit news organization in Germany.

By February the number had grown to 102 — some masquerading as national news outlets, others as local media in Berlin, Hamburg and other cities.

On Jan. 30, one of the sites uploaded a video claiming that Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck conspired with Ukraine to steal 50 paintings from a Berlin art gallery. Another claimed Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union and the front-runner to become the next chancellor, was a “person of interest” in a 20-year-old murder case.

“The network is showing its agility,” said Clément Briens, an analyst with Recorded Future, which also published a report detailing Russian disinformation in Germany on Thursday.

Mr. Dougan, reached in Moscow, declined to answer questions about his role, but criticized the current German government as a puppet of the United States. “All their leaders need to be replaced,” he said.

‘Deepfakes of regular people’

Not all fake videos feature prominent politicians. Another tactic that has been gaining momentum is altering videos that feature regular people.

In January, Natalie Finch, a mental health nurse, made a promotional video on Instagram for the college in Britain where she works, the University of Bradford. Two weeks later the video reappeared on Bluesky, except this time she was not speaking about nursing but the mental health of candidates for Germany’s Christian Democratic Union.

The new version was a fake, using an artificial intelligence tool to recreate her voice reading a different script over the same video, emblazoned with the university’s logo. “The video started with me introducing myself, introducing the university and then, very seamlessly I have to say, became a video about the German government,” she said in an interview.

The fake was one of several identified by Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub. Others included manipulated audio of the presidents of several U.S. universities, and a fabricated video of a British policeman claiming to have passed on warnings of terrorist attacks in Germany.

“These are some of the clearest examples of deepfakes being used for disinformation that I’ve seen,” said Darren L. Linvill, a director of the hub who notified Ms. Finch about the manipulated video. “And what’s compelling about them is that some of them are just deepfakes of regular people.”

What impact Russia’s campaign will have on the outcome of the election remains uncertain. The researchers say the efforts have not so far meaningfully altered voter preferences, but the huge volume of disinformation has certainly seeped into the public discourse, carefully tailored to compound existing social grievances.

“The Russians very intricately study the newspapers, print media, television in their target countries,” Brian Liston, an analyst at Recorded Future, said. “They probably know more about a country’s politics than the country knows its own politics in many instances.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said the quantity and sophistication of the disinformation have exceeded anything it has previously seen.

“The danger of disinformation campaigns is that they influence voters in their voting decision,” the Office for the Protection of the Constitution said in a statement to The Times. “There is also a risk that the election itself will be delegitimized and thereby cast into doubt by the public.”

There are signs that the campaign is intensifying. The 48 accounts traced to Russia on X over the past month have collectively received 2.5 million views, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s study found. Over the course of January, the number of engagements — likes or shares — tripled.

The Russian efforts benefit significantly when prominent politicians or influencers online, like Mr. Protschka of the Alternative for Germany, share the false claims, which researchers call “disinformation laundering.”

Mr. Musk, who is currently playing an outsize role in the Trump administration, may be the biggest influence. He has called the chancellor a “fool” and Germany’s president “an undemocratic tyrant.” Germany, he wrote in an opinion piece for a major newspaper in December, is “teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse.”

Mr. Musk has also amplified supporters of Alternative for Germany by sharing their posts on X. Some of these influencers were marginalized or even banned on the platform before Mr. Musk took over and reinstated them. Many, like Naomi Seibt, a 24-year-old vaccine and climate change skeptic, now post content in English to attract his attention.

Mr. Musk has also amplified Russian propaganda. In October 2023 he shared a meme created as part of an influence campaign run by Social Design Agency, an internet company in Moscow that has been sanctioned by the United States. Internal company documents from the Social Design Agency seen by CeMAS show that the Russians consider it a victory when their material is shared by public figures.

“This is the first German election where both the Kremlin and a powerful figure from the new U.S. administration are trying to influence the process and supporting the same far-right party,” said Julia Smirnova, an analyst at CeMAS.

“When figures like Musk share Russian propaganda narratives,” Ms. Smirnova said, “they ultimately normalize them, boost their reach and cause more damage than a network of inauthentic accounts.”

President Trump signed a memorandum on Thursday ordering his advisers to calculate new tariff levels for other countries globally, an ambitious task that will shatter the rules of the global trading system and likely set off furious negotiations in the coming months.

The president directed his advisers to come up with new tariff levels that take into account a range of trade barriers and other economic approaches adopted by America’s trading partners. That includes not only the tariffs that other countries charge the United States, but also the taxes they charge on foreign products, the subsidies they give their industries, their exchange rates, and other behaviors the president deems unfair.

The president has said the step was necessary to even out America’s “unfair” relationships and stop other countries from taking advantage of the United States on trade. But he made clear that his ultimate goal was to force companies to bring their manufacturing back to the United States.

“If you build your product in the United States, there are no tariffs,” he said during remarks in the Oval Office.

Howard Lutnick, the president’s nominee for commerce secretary, and Jamieson Greer, his pick for trade representative, will come up with the numbers “quickly,” in concert with other advisers, a White House official, who did not have permission to speak for attribution, said in a call with reporters on Thursday.

The decision to rework the tariffs that America charges on imported goods would represent a dramatic overhaul of the global trading system. For decades, the United States has set its tariff levels through negotiations at international trade bodies like the World Trade Organization. Setting new levies — likely to be higher than what the United States charges today — would effectively scrap that system in favor of one determined solely by U.S. officials and based on their own criteria.

Timothy Brightbill, a lawyer at Wiley Rein, said a move toward a reciprocity-based tariff system would be “a fundamental change to U.S. trade policy, and among the biggest in more than 75 years — since the creation of the current multilateral trading system” in 1947.

The action seems likely to kick off intense negotiations with governments whose economies depend on exports to the United States. It could also elicit trade wars on multiple fronts if other countries choose to increase their own tariffs in retaliation.

The White House official said in the call that other countries would be given the opportunity to negotiate on the levies they will face.

Nearly every country would be affected, but the move could have particularly significant consequences for India, Japan and the European Union. Mr. Trump and his staff members have repeatedly pointed to Europe’s value-added tax as an additional injustice on top of tariffs.

Peter Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for trade, called the European Union’s VAT tax the “poster child” for unfair trade toward American business, saying that such treatment had allowed Germany to export to the United States many times the number of cars that it bought from it.

“President Trump is no longer willing to tolerate that,” Mr. Navarro said. “The Trump fair and reciprocal plan will put a swift end to such exploitation of American workers.”

The E.U. requires a standard value-added tax rate on most goods and services, and while they vary by country, they average about 22 percent across European nations. The tax is applied at each stage in a supply chain, and the cost is usually borne by the end consumer.

The United States is an outlier among advanced economies in not levying a value-added tax on products like cars.

Mr. Trump’s proposal marks a significant reversal in a decades-long push in trade policy toward lowering international barriers. While past presidents have often negotiated with foreign countries over tariffs, those agreements have typically led to lower levies, not higher ones. No president has taken Mr. Trump’s approach of raising U.S. tariffs to match other countries’ rates.

The reciprocal tariff plan is the latest move by Mr. Trump to punish allies and adversaries alike with an extraordinary array of trade actions. On Monday, the president signed a proclamation imposing 25 percent tariffs on all foreign steel and aluminum. Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office, he said the tariffs would be “the first of many.”

In addition to the reciprocal tariffs, Mr. Trump said his advisers would meet over the next four weeks to discuss measures on cars, pharmaceuticals, chips and other goods.

“They’ve been taking advantage of us for years and years and years,” he said of other countries. “They’ve charged us and we haven’t charged them. And it’s time to be reciprocal.”

In the past weeks, Mr. Trump’s almost-daily tariff threats have rocked diplomatic and economic relationships. The United States imposed an additional 10 percent tariff on all products from China last week, and came within hours of putting sweeping tariffs on Canada and Mexico that would have brought U.S. tariff rates to a level not seen since the 1940s.

The president had criticized Canada and Mexico for sending drugs and migrants to the United States, but agreed to put off the tariffs for 30 days after the countries offered him some concessions.

Reciprocal tariffs will likely broaden Mr. Trump’s trade fight to even more countries. It remains to be seen whether the president uses the strategy to dramatically raise U.S. barriers to imports, or as a lever to extract concessions from countries that end up opening foreign markets.

When asked which legal authority would be used to impose tariffs, the White House official said the president could draw on several according to the action and country, including Section 232, which relates to national security; Section 301, which relates to unfair trading; and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The official said that Mr. Trump was not ruling out a further “universal” tariff later to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, but that for now the president had chosen to pursue reciprocal treatment.

Mr. Trump floated proposals in his first term and his 2024 campaign of making trade more reciprocal by matching the tariff rates that countries impose on American products.

He has often pointed to America’s lower tariff rate as evidence the country is being taken advantage of. The United States has an average tariff rate of around 3 percent, lower than other countries, but still roughly in line with those of Canada, Britain, Japan and the European Union. Globally, wealthy countries tend to have lower tariff rates, while poorer countries have negotiated higher ones, to protect their less developed industries and subsistence farmers.

But Mr. Trump has criticized other countries for charging higher tariffs on certain American products than the United States charges them. For example, he has pointed to the 10 percent tariff that the European Union charges on American cars, versus a 2.5 percent tariff for cars sold in the other direction.

The United States has set its tariff rates for imports lower than that of some trading partners, because for decades U.S. officials were convinced of the benefits of freer trade. They believed lower tariffs would allow the United States to import cheap products for U.S. consumers and raw materials for its factories, fueling the American economy.

Mr. Trump’s views differ. He argues that equaling out American tariff rates is essential to restoring U.S. manufacturing, and that higher tariffs will reduce the trade deficit. Some economists disagree, arguing that movements in currency could offset any effects on the trade deficit.

Economists and historians also say that the varying tariffs that countries put on each other’s products are not evidence of discrimination. Rather, they reflect the priorities that each government had when it agreed to maximum tariff rates in negotiations with other members of the World Trade Organization.

Those negotiations gave governments the opportunity to fight for higher tariff rates on industries they wanted to protect, and accept lower tariff rates on products they were more likely to import.

Inu Manak, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said tariff rates were “a reflection of the specific domestic political economy concerns of a given country.” For example, she said, U.S. officials negotiated double-digit tariffs on wool sweaters and footwear to protect American producers at the time.

Other countries protect their industries, too, she said, but want to keep tariffs low “so that their consumers and manufacturers have access to a broad selection of items at the most competitive price.”

Douglas Irwin, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, said that countries had come out of the Great Depression and World War II with wildly different tariff codes. When trade negotiations began in 1947, countries began to cut tariffs piecemeal. In the 1960s, many countries agreed to lower all tariffs, but there was no effort to equalize them on specific products.

“Reciprocity in this case was ‘let’s all cut by about the same amount’ not ‘let’s equalize our tariffs on a product by product basis,’ which seems to be what the Trump view of reciprocity should be,” he said.

Raising tariffs above the rate the United States has agreed to at the W.T.O. would violate the trade group’s commitments, and other members of the W.T.O. could challenge that action. But the panel at the W.T.O. in charge of resolving such disputes was effectively neutered in the first Trump administration when the United States refused to appoint any more members to it. The Biden administration continued that policy.

Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from Brussels.

A jet of steam rises with a hiss as a red hot poker plunges into a bowl of cider. A garlanded woman spears a piece of toast with a long fork and lodges the offering among the branches of a tree. Then, amid shouts from the watching crowd, the torch-lit ceremony ends with gunfire ringing out beneath the clear night winter sky.

For most of the year, Sheppy’s farm at Bradford-on-Tone in the west of England uses state of the art machinery to tend its 22,000 apple trees and produce more than half a million gallons of cider annually.

But for one evening in January, modern farming techniques are set aside for an ancient ritual called “wassailing,” where the coming year’s apple crop is blessed, evil spirits are chased away and cider is enthusiastically drunk by hundreds of spectators.

Dating from at least the 13th century, wassailing (the word derives from an Old English toast to good health, “waes hael”) seemed to have almost died out by the 1990s.

But recently, it has made a comeback at cider makers and community events, particularly in the west of England, spurred by growing interest in tradition and folklore, a renewed respect for the countryside and a desire among some Britons to liven up the grim winter months with a party.

“Wassailing fell by the wayside for a very long time and has had a huge revival,” said Louisa Sheppy, co-owner of Sheppy’s, a firm that has been making cider for more than two centuries, as she prepared the company’s farm for its seventh, consecutive year of hosting a wassail (one of dozens advertised around the region this winter).

Ms. Sheppy is not superstitious and does not really believe — as tradition holds — that the fate of the crop hinges on the annual wassail. But she values the event, which attracts more than 400 paying guests, promotes cider and features folk dancers known as Morris Men and a lively barn dance.

But before the dancing, visitors first joined in a song directed at two trees, imploring them to yield “hatfuls, capfuls, three-bushel bagfuls,” of fruit. Then the evening’s “wassail queen” (who symbolizes fertility and abundance) tasted heated cider, soaked a piece of toast in it and poured the rest around the tree roots.

Wearing a crown of ivy, mistletoe, hellebore and rosemary, the queen used a toasting fork to place the bread in the branches — a gesture designed to attract robins, which are seen as harbingers of spring — before shotguns were fired to drive away malevolent spirits.

Although her evening passed off smoothly, it was not stress free for Sheppy’s 2025 wassail queen, Em Sibley. Drinking the cider was fine (“Oh my god, it really is good, sweet and yummy,” she said) and so was pouring it around the tree.

Trickier, however, was soaking the toast in cider without rendering it soggy and then levering it off a long fork into the tree’s branches without sending the bread pieces tumbling.

“You don’t want to muck it up — just in case,” said Ms. Sibley, an employee at Sheppy’s, alluding to the possible celestial consequences of botching a ritual meant to guarantee the crop.

“When it all does go wrong, and the harvest is down, and we haven’t got as many apples for the year as normal,” said Ms. Sibley, “you don’t want to be the one who thinks ‘oh damn: It could have been the toast!’”

Once a Christmas or New Year tradition, wassailing now typically takes place around Jan. 18 or later.

The ceremonies have evolved over time, according to Ronald Hutton, a professor of history at the University of Bristol, who dates the first recorded wassails to the 13th century, when a large wooden bowl with alcohol was passed around by friends standing in a circle.

Someone would drink and call “waes hael” — be well — and the others would chorus back “drinc hael” or drink well, he said, adding that this could descend into a medieval drinking game.

“You’d carry on passing the wassail bowl from hand to hand and taking a slurp until either the host decided enough was enough — or people gradually keeled over and the winner was left standing,” said Professor Hutton, author of a book on English folklore.

By the 16th century, the link to agriculture was established, with farmers singing to and blessing bee hives, fruit trees, crops, sheep and cattle to encourage a bountiful harvest.

Interest in wassailing ebbed in the last century, said Professor Hutton, “with the growth of horticulture and fertilizers, a better knowledge of how trees and farms work, and a decline in the belief that singing to your trees or fields actually does any good.”

As he prepared to put on his multicolored costume, Mike Highfield, 64, a Morris dancer and master of ceremonies at Sheppy’s, where he gives visitor tours, welcomed the resurgence.

“We should celebrate our culture because cider really was the wine of England at one stage,” Mr. Highfield said, adding that the night brings people together over a beverage that, apart from its low alcohol version, typically ranges in strength from 4 percent to 7.5 percent alcohol.

“Once you let your hair down and scream at an apple tree — and you shout and you sing — you start to talk to people because you lose some of your inhibitions,” he said.

One spectator, Matthew Mudge, 62, a church musician from Cardiff, Wales, said he had wanted to attend a wassail for decades. “It’s a fantastic tradition. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get here,” Mr. Mudge said as he enjoyed a cider after the ceremony, adding, “All wassails involve drinking and perhaps that’s why they’ve lived for six centuries.”

In the village of Midsomer Norton, about 50 miles away, 100 people or so turned out for a community event to wassail three small apple trees in the local park. Instead of a queen, local children helped place pieces of toast in the branches. Trevor Hughes, 70, a Morris dancer, who conducted the ceremony, said the tradition had never disappeared here.

“We have always done wassails at this time of year. It may not have been advertised, there may have been just local village events, but it never really died,” he said. Lately, he added “there has been an explosion of wassails because it’s a simple means of having a laugh.”

While the fun of wassailing is irrefutable, does anyone really think it protects the crop?

“The rationalist in me says ‘of course not, how could it,’” said Professor Hutton, who spends a Sunday afternoon each January with friends in his garden, singing to his trees over a few drinks.

He noted, however, that his apple tree “never bore anything until I ‘wassailed’ it the first time.” adding: “It has borne bumper crops every year since.”

The Trump administration deported migrants from several Asian nations to Panama on Wednesday night, Panamanian and U.S. officials said, in a move that could signal much faster removals of immigrants who have remained in the United States because their countries have made it difficult to return them.

The flight carrying the migrants, a military plane that took off from California, appears to be the first of its kind during the Trump administration. It came on the heels of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit last week to Panama, which has been under tremendous pressure from President Trump over how it runs the Panama Canal.

The more than 100 migrants on the flight, including families, had entered the United States illegally from countries such as Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. It is often difficult for the United States to return migrants to those nations.

President José Raúl Mulino of Panama, speaking at a news conference on Thursday morning, said 119 people of “the most diverse nationalities in the world” had arrived the night before on a U.S. Air Force flight at an airport outside Panama City.

Mr. Mulino said they were being housed in a local hotel and would be moved to a shelter in Darién, a province in Panama’s east, a process managed by the International Organization for Migration. From there, he said, they would be repatriated.

“We hope to get them out of there as soon as possible on flights from the United States,” Mr. Mulino said, adding, “This is another contribution Panama is making on the migration issue.”

The flight could herald a new front in Mr. Trump’s efforts to conduct a mass removal of unauthorized immigrants, and it shows the willingness of at least some Latin American countries, under intense diplomatic pressure, to assist him. But it also raises questions about what will happen to migrants as they are shunted to another country where they may be unfamiliar with the language or culture.

The Panamanian government announced a proposal this week to send some newly arrived migrants to a small town at the end of the Darién Gap, a dangerous jungle in southern Panama, and then repatriate them “by air or sea to their countries of origin.”

Responding to reporters’ questions on Thursday, Mr. Mulino said two more U.S. Air Force flights were expected to bring a total of about 360 deported migrants to Panama. He said he expected they would quickly be flown to their countries of origin from Darién in an effort that would be paid for entirely by the United States. Mr. Mulino did not give a timeline for when the other flights were scheduled to arrive.

Migration at the southern U.S. border has shifted in recent years to include not just people coming from Mexico and Central America but also those from a wider range of countries, including ones that either do not accept deportation flights or take them sparingly.

The Trump administration has already received promises from El Salvador and Guatemala to accept migrants of other nationalities. Administration officials have indicated they are discussing similar deals with other countries.

But critics have noted that the United States could be sending migrants into more dangerous conditions. El Salvador, for example, has been accused of widespread human rights violations in its detentions, and Guatemala has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world.

After meeting with Mr. Rubio this month, Mr. Mulino had also indicated a willingness to receive deportees from other countries. (Panama does not send large numbers of migrants to the United States, as Mr. Mulino noted.)

“We are completely certain that reverse immigrants will come at some point — that is, they will be sent back either along the same route or because the United States will bring them back to deport them from here,” Mr. Mulino said.

The government in Panama has been under greater pressure than other Latin American countries to show it is on board with Mr. Trump’s priorities for the region, including curbing China’s influence and controlling illegal migration. Mr. Trump has focused on what he sees as China’s role in the Panama Canal and threatened that the United States would retake control of it.

Mr. Mulino, who has sought to align himself with Mr. Trump on migration, made assurances that he would address the role of China in Panama. He also emphasized a 94 percent reduction over the past year in migration at the Darién Gap, where hundreds of thousands of migrants had been entering the country from Colombia on their way north to the U.S. border.

Federico Rios contributed reporting.