Christian Blex is a German politician of the AfD. He has been a member of the state Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia since 2017 and is currently the state treasurer of the North Rhine-Westphalian AfD. He has been blamed for supporting Vladimir Putin’s war and for undertaking a propaganda trip.
In September 2022, Blex travelled to Russia with two members of the AfD parliamentary group in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt, to visit the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas from there. Shortly after the violent annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia set up and armed pro-Russian militias in Donbas, which fought and are battling there together with regular Russian troops against the Ukrainian armed forces and volunteer militias (Russo-Ukrainian War).
In the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian government expelled hundreds of thousands of people living there Russia caused great damage. Entering Ukrainian territory via Russia would have disregarded Ukrainian law. In addition, this visit to an area controlled by the Russian occupiers would have been a clear breach of the Federal Republic’s sanctions policy against the aggressor Russia. The trip was heavily slammed throughout Germany, including by AfD politicians.
The US-based Robert Lansing Institute for Global Threats and Democracies Studies (IGTDS), which defines itself as a non-partisan, non-profit public policy research organisation, expressed the journey was taking place under the auspices of the Russian military secret service, members of whom would be escorting the politicians to Donbas. The AfD has a standing for its pro-Russian, sometimes also pro-Putin, stance.
The travelling politicians including Christian Blex are well-known for their support of maintaining German-Russian relations despite the war, including dumping sanctions against Russia. They have also expressed their support for opening the Nord Stream II pipeline, which was indicated to provide a new supply of gas from Russia to Germany in addition to the flow from Nord Stream I, before it was discarded by Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, just before the start of the invasion of Ukraine.
Parliamentarians with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) had traveled around Syria in an unusual trip, it was a “private” trip arranged by the group’s de-facto leader Christian Blex,
In a statement published on Blex’s Facebook page, the group expressed the goal of the trip is to gauge “the humanitarian situation and reconstruction work” as well as to form a
“rational assessment of the crisis in Syria about the ongoing debate about its classification as a safe country of origin, which also affects the decision to suspend deportation for rejected asylum-seekers.”
