Migrant acquitted of rape?

Last Wednesday 26 October, Russian TV channel Pervyi Kanal reported a shocking story: an Austrian court acquitted a Middle-Eastern refugee of raping a 10-year-old boy, because the refugee did not speak German and thus he did not understand that the boy said no.

Putin cites debunked story
In fact, the immigrant was not acquitted, but is still in custody and awaits a new trial that will take place in 2017. Within 24 hours, The Insider and the Russian-language service of Deutsche Welle showed that this piece of news was a fake. Pervyi Kanal afterwards deleted the item from its website.

However, at a conference for interethnic relations this Monday 31 October, President Putin cited this story. He mentioned it to explain why Russia should draw on its own experiences with interethnic relations, rather than Europe’s.

“You saw what happens — an immigrant raped a child in one of the European countries,“ the President said, as reported by the Moscow Times. Mr. Putin went on to explain that this was “the result of the unraveling of traditional national values and of a feeling of guilt vis a vis migrants”, according to Austrian daily Kurier.

Destabilising European society
This is not the first time that the refugee crisis is used in pro-Kremlin disinformation. The issue can be used to persuade the Russian audience that Europe is full of dangerous problems and diverts from “traditional values“. And for an audience outside Russia, the story can exacerbate the existing tensions in society in order to destabilise European society.

The best-known example of this was the so-called „Lisa case“ in Germany. Russian state media faked a story about a 13-year-old Russian-speaking German girl raped by migrants. Although the story was soon proved to be fake, it was repeated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who accused German authorities of “sweeping the problems under the rug“.