It's not that odd if you consider that Germany is a democracy and Russia is a dictatorship with a history of poisoning dissenters.
Read the story about this mathematician who has been sentenced to prison for 6 years in Russia. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/01/22/imprisoned-for-his-e...
At some point, we have to use some sort of priors to evaluate the truth of claims from various sources.