For many years now, Putin's propagandists have been working tirelessly to destabilize western democracies and stir up resentment and insecurity with targeted false reports.
A particularly blatant case in Germany was the “Lisa” case, which the Russian media used in 2016 to create fake news in German-Russian circles as part of the refugee crisis.
The thirteen-year-old girl Lisa with German-Russian parents had run away from home because of problems at school, but had claimed to have been detained and raped by "Southerners" to cover it up.
Even when it had long been clear that Lisa was staying with her boyfriend at the time in question and had had consensual sex with two men weeks before her alleged kidnapping,
Pure burger
Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.
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The “case”, which was reported on various social media on Sunday, fits the pattern of Russian disinformation at first glance.
In a video post lasting a good one and a half minutes, a stocky woman reports in Russian that a 16-year-old Russian helper named Daniel was beaten to death by Ukrainian refugees in a home for asylum seekers in Euskirchen simply because he spoke Russian.
A friend told her about it at the train station.
At the end, the approximately 30-year-old woman seems to burst into tears, sobbing and clutching her heart.
"Check for authenticity with particular care"
The video spread rapidly.
In the evening, the responsible Bonn police reacted on Twitter: There was no information about such a violent attack or even a death.
It is assumed that it is a “deliberate fake video intended to incite hatred.
We ask you not to distribute this video any further and to check all information, especially from social media, very carefully for the authenticity of the reported facts.
On Sunday evening, the woman reported with another message.
"I want to apologize to everyone who saw my video, it all turned out to be untrue," she said in Russian.
"I just believed it, I believed it so much I didn't even need any facts, no pictures, no evidence.
I don't want you to make the same mistake I did, don't believe anyone without validation."
It is initially unclear who the actual originator of the fake news is.
According to a report by "t-online", there was a text on the "case" on Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. German time on a "news page" of the Russian state "Federal News Agency" without citing a source.
However, the fabricated story only found widespread distribution when Alina Lipp shared the video of the stocky woman on the Telegram messenger service.
Born in Hamburg in 1993 to a German mother and a Russian father, Lipp is an inveterate Putin propagandist, glorifying the attack on Ukraine and using appropriate methods to report from the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People's Republic”.