German minister: Russia waging fake news ‘propaganda war’

BERLIN – Germany’s finance minister says Russia is conducting a “propaganda war” through fake news to try to garner influence abroad, and it has to stop.

Wolfgang Schaeuble told a group of foreign correspondents in Berlin on Tuesday that Kremlin-funded Russia Today produces “false reports from morning to evening,” which “is not acceptable and needs to end.”

Schaeuble says there is a “constant and unbelievably deceitful” barrage of Russian propaganda.

Schaeuble didn’t specify any reports, but last month Lithuanian authorities quickly debunked a story that a German soldier serving as part of a NATO mission there had raped a teenage girl.

Lithuanian authorities suggested Russia may have invented the claim to discredit the new NATO force on its borders.