Putin's little helpers.

Mariupol was completely destroyed by Russia. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed and displaced. Reconstruction plays a central role in the Russian propaganda war. According to Monitor research, German companies are also involved.

It was one of the most horrific battles of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For weeks, Russian troops besieged Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, starving the population, sparing neither the patients in hospitals nor civilians hiding in the theater. Many survivors were driven out by Putin's army. When the Russian flag was raised on the destroyed buildings of Mariupol, construction work began on the "new" Mariupol. A Russian city, with Russian inhabitants, built on behalf of the Kremlin. There are building sites all over the city, blocks of flats rising from the ground.

This is so important for the Z-propaganda that even Putin himself came to see the progress of the work last year. "We will rebuild the apartments, schools, hospitals, theaters and museums," he said about Mariupol. In other words, everything that he previously had brutally destroyed.

Reporters from the ARD political magazine Monitor set out in search of clues. In business reports, on company websites, in pictures and in videos - there are clues and evidence everywhere that German companies are also playing an important role in the reconstruction of Mariupol, with heavy machinery or windows bearing the logos of several German manufacturers. And again and again on plaster sacks: the name Knauf. The German family business from the Franconian province is a world leader in gypsum production. Also because it has been doing important business in Russia for a long time.

Company patriarch Nikolaus Knauf was the Russian honorary consul for more than two decades, in photos he smiles next to Putin. He retained this post even after the annexation of Crimea, and in 2018 he still described the subsequent sanctions against Russia as "terrible". Knauf still employs 4.000 people in Russia and generates billions there. He wrote to Monitor in a general statement on its Russian business that he condemns the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and complies with all EU sanctions against Russia. The company produces in Russia "exclusively for the Russian market". However, Knauf left an extensive list of questions from the editorial team unanswered.

So does the Russian business have nothing to do with the German parent company? Sanctions law expert Viktor Winkler disagrees: "The idea that if I only operate in Russia with a subsidiary in Russia, only on Russian territory, that this is irrelevant to sanctions, so to speak, is an absolute myth and couldn't be further from reality."

But Knauf is not an isolated case. The logo of a German company from Münsterland in North Rhine-Westphalia - WKB Systems GmbH. The main shareholder of the company is the Russian oligarch Viktor Konstantinovich Budarin. He used his German company as a supplier for the construction industry in Putin's Russia. Customs data available to Monitor show that WKB Systems GmbH supplied entire plants for factories for the production of aerated concrete blocks to a Russian company owned by Budarin.

Investigation (German) or (English translated)

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