BERLIN — A leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia doesn’t pose a threat to his country — but that Poland potentially does.

The comments, which echo Kremlin messaging, come at a time when centrist German politicians are increasingly warning that the AfD is using its rising influence to act as a mouthpiece for Putin inside Germany — a claim AfD leaders strongly deny.

Putin “hasn’t done anything to me,” Tino Chrupalla, the co-leader of the AfD, said on German public television. “I don’t see any danger to Germany from Russia at the moment.”

Chrupalla went on to insist that any country can potentially pose a threat to Germany.

“Take Poland, for example,” Chrupalla said, citing the country’s refusal to extradite a Ukrainian citizen German authorities suspect of sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022. “Poland can also be a threat to us.”

German centrists are increasingly portraying the AfD as a party that represents Russian interests from inside Germany, with some going so far as to argue the Kremlin is taking advantage of the party’s access to official information for espionage.

Marc Henrichmann, the conservative chairman of the Bundestag’s intelligence oversight committee, said he believes that Russia is doing exactly this.

“Russia is naturally exerting its obvious influence in parliament, especially in the AfD, in order to spy and obtain sensitive information,” Henrichmann recently told German newspaper Handelsblatt. “The AfD is gratefully allowing itself to be used for this betrayal by Putin.”

Chrupalla has forcefully pushed back against those accusations.

“They accuse us of things they can never prove, and I find that perfidious,” he said during the talk show.

Chrupalla’s comments come as AfD leaders are enmeshed in an internal dispute over a group of party politicians who were planning a trip to Russia to attend an international conference of the BRICS countries in Sochi, Russia.

The AfD’s other co-leader, Alice Weidel — who has sought to polish the AfD’s image, rein in some of its most overt pro-Russian politicians and has sought closer relations to the Donald Trump administration in the U.S. — has attempted to stop the politicians from attending, signaling a growing rift inside her party over just how far support for Russia should go.

“We shouldn’t continue like this,” she told reporters in the Bundestag on Tuesday. “We can’t afford it, and we don’t want to.”