Hans-Thomas Tillschneider is a Romanian -German politician. Since March 2016 he has been a fellow of the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt and a cultural policy representative for the AfD parliamentary group. He has been assistant state chairman of the AfD Saxony-Anhalt since 2020 and since 2021 also 2nd deputy leader of the AfD parliamentary party in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt.
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider doesn’t conceal his affection for Russia even during the war. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tillschneider unleashed a post on Facebook saying, “Russia attacks, writes the Tagesschau. Wrong. Russia is protecting itself!”. The post was later deleted.
In September 2022, he journeyed to Russia with two other AfD state parliamentarians and was also scheduled to visit the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine in the Donbas. The trip was noticed as support for Russian propaganda in the Ukraine war. AfD federal spokeswoman Alice Weidel emphasised that it was a “private trip” and called the venture “not productive”. The three MPs withdrew their trip and did not travel to the Donbas. Since January 2023, Tillschneider has been reporting– according to his statements without accepting any remuneration – a monthly column for the Russian daily newspaper Vedomosti, in which he lauds the Kremlin and repeats Russian propaganda.
The visit was highly controversial after the attack on Ukraine. The AfD’s national executive committee prevented them from persisting to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, but this did not put a termination to Tillschneider’s further regular travels to Russia. Making his perspective clear in another Facebook post, he noted: “Transatlanticists against Eurasians! We have to rethink.” In August 2022, he heard at a security conference in Moscow where he railed against the “rainbow empire”.
When Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, was in Moscow in August 2023, he unleashed a video in which he lectured about the security conference he had observed there. A quote from the video illustrates his closeness to Russia.
“Now our government also speaks occasionally of a multipolar world order, but they mean the term descriptively, indicating the fact that several centres of power are now emerging in the world. This is not how it was used at the Moscow Security Conference. There it was used normatively. It described the goal. Everyone there agreed. We want a multipolar world order. And in this sense, the multipolar world order is the antithesis of the unipolar world order, of the world dominated by the USA.” Hans-Thomas Tillschneider in a video in Moscow in August 2023.
Tillschneider notices Putin’s Russia as an ally in the battle against the politics of equality and sexual self-determination. Russian propaganda, since the battle particularly, has criticised Europe as “gay Europe” and “Satan’s empire.” The war against Ukraine is noticed as a “crusade.”
