A woman speaks on her phone, her voice choking on tears: she reports about a young Russian who was murdered by Ukrainians.
The reason: he spoke Russian.
A cruel murder in the middle of Germany?
The problem: the story is wrong.
The police in Euskirchen, where the murder is said to have happened, don't know anything about it and quickly deny the story.
And yet the story of the alleged murder spread rapidly on the Internet.
The blogger Alina Lipp, among others, is responsible for this, and she spreads it to her 100,000 subscribers on Telegram.
The story is also quickly found on Russian propaganda sites on the Internet as a report without a source.
That happened a good week ago, but the little story stands for something bigger: the two sides of Russian disinformation are easy to recognize: Russian news sites close to the state and buyers from the conspiracy theory milieu who spread the news.
The aim is to destabilize democracies
The aim of disinformation is not first and foremost for all people to believe it.
It's also about arousing uncertainty and doubts in people, says Josef Holnburger.
He is Managing Director of Cemas, the center for monitoring, analysis and strategy, which as an organization bundles expertise on topics such as conspiracy ideologies, anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism.
Holnburger has been researching disinformation and conspiracy ideologies for years and, above all, how all of this spreads on the Internet.
"As a result, it's actually about destabilizing democracies," he says.
"That's why narratives are shared that contradict each other." Holnburger says that one can see this particularly well during the war in Ukraine: "They say, for example, that there is no war at all, only a special operation.
On the other hand, it is claimed that a war was necessary because bioweapons laboratories have now been discovered in Ukraine and need to be cleared out, or because NATO had a secret plan of attack anyway." In the end, it is about offering different narratives and to see »what sticks in the end.«
But to understand the current Russian propaganda war, one has to start even earlier.
In this episode of the foreign podcast "Eight Billion" we talk about the various actors in the Russian disinformation campaigns, the goals behind them and why the German milieu of lateral thinkers thinks so highly of Putin, even though he is not opposed to vaccination.
Listen to this episode here:
You can find the SPIEGEL news blog with all current developments in the Ukraine war here.