Henning Zoz is a German politician and entrepreneur with business headquarters in Wenden- Hünsborn. He has ties with the AfD party. Henning Zoz has been an associate of the AfD since November 2017. In March 2018, the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation reported that it had appointed Zoz to the foundation’s board of trustees. Based on his activities, it has come to light that he has tilted towards Russia.
In the 2020 local elections, Zoz conducted for the AfD for mayor of the city of Siegen, obtaining 7.65% of the valid votes. In January 2021, Zoz was appointed as the AfD’s direct candidate for constituency 148, Siegen-Wittgenstein, in the 2021 federal election. At the NRW AfD’s election party meeting in May 2021, although he laid for almost every list position, he did not perform a list position for the 2021 federal election. In the federal election on September 26, he acquired 9% of the first votes.
In 2020, representatives of German right-wing populists (AfD) came to Russia-occupied Luhansk to take part in an “official” event of the self-proclaimed “Luhansk People’s Republic” (“LPR”). This was informed by Ukraine’s European Pravda media outlet regarding a tweet by a journalist from Bild Julian Röpcke.
“The #AfD once again breaks Ukrainian law and illegally visits the so-called ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine,” the journalist noted. At a discussion with members of the “LPR” were Gunnar Lindemann, an AfD member from the Berlin district of Marzahn sitting in the Berlin City Parliament, and Richard Gretzinger, a component of the board of the AfD regional office. They were accompanied by Henning Zoz.
Together with his group colleague Gunnar Lindemann, he travelled several times to the areas in Donbas that had seceded from Ukraine with the backing of Russia, where he met with Denis Vladimirovich Pushilin, the president of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republic and the head of the Russian biker gang Night Wolves, who battled on the side of the separatists in Donbas, Alexander Sergeyevich Saldostanov, as well as Belarus and Syria.
On the other hand, The Foreign Ministry of Ukraine has criticised a visit of representatives of the far-right Alternative for Germany party Henning Zoz to the Russia-occupied territories of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. “We regard this visit as disrespect to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, failure of the basic principles of international law and the national legislation of Ukraine,” the ministry stated.
The Foreign Ministry also stated that those politicians have visited the occupied regions of Ukraine before. “This proves that they consciously disregarded the national legislation of Ukraine and international law in acceptance of Russia’s ideology,” the ministry stated, adding that “such measures will be taken into account for the resolution of legal liability in line with the Ukrainian legislation.”
