Three days before Berlin's state elections, a fabricated video depicting the destruction of AfD postal ballots spread to 3.2 million viewers — not as an act of electoral sabotage, but as a simulation of one, engineered to make citizens doubt the integrity of their own democratic institutions. Investigators from Deutsche Welle found the materials in the footage to be inauthentic, the distribution network to bear the hallmarks of coordinated foreign influence, and the operation itself to carry the signature of Storm-1516, a Russian campaign with a documented history of targeting European electio