I asked Chatgpt whether Putin said this:
No. I can find no credible evidence that Vladimir Putin said or wrote this. It appears to be a fabricated quotation that has circulated online for some time and has now been repackaged to make it look connected to Friedrich Merz and the AfD’s recent election success.
There is a particularly strong clue: essentially the same eight-point quotation was circulating by March 2025, long before the September 2026 Saxony-Anhalt election result referred to in the version you received. One March 2025 discussion even has a participant asking where Putin said it, with the response that it was a German Internet joke.
I also found the nearly identical text published online in June 2026 under the headline “Putin on Germany,” but that page supplies no speech, interview, video, Kremlin transcript, date, venue, or primary source establishing that Putin actually said it. Another site subsequently labeled it “Putin’s Message to Germany, 26 June 2026,” again without providing a verifiable primary source.
Most importantly, searches of official Russian presidential material and current reporting do not turn up a Putin speech containing these lines. Meanwhile, the AfD result that the social-media introduction apparently refers to really is very recent: on September 7, 2026, the AfD won about 44% in Saxony-Anhalt, and Merz publicly reacted to the result. That makes the introduction look like someone attached an old viral fake quote to a new political event.
Some individual themes in it concern real German debates—government borrowing, infrastructure, migration costs, rail reliability, etc.—which probably makes the fabrication sound plausible. For example, Germany does have a €500 billion infrastructure investment fund, but that does not establish Putin as the author of these remarks.
Bottom line: I would regard this as falsely attributed to Putin unless someone can produce an original Russian-language Kremlin transcript or an unedited video showing him saying it.
If you’d like, I can also try to trace this quotation back to its earliest appearance in German and see who actually wrote it.
so, hoax