Putin Seeks to Benefit from an Alleged Rape in Berlin

A recent incident in Berlin and the way it has been blown up by the Russian state propaganda machine provides an insight into President Vladimir Putin's tactics toward Europe. He's actively using the continent's refugee crisis and the Russian-speaking disapora's wariness about it to destabilize governments that are hostile to him, including Chancellor Angela Merkel's in Germany.

On Jan. 11, a 13-year-old girl from a Russian-speaking family in Marzahn, a neighborhood of ugly Communist-era high-rises in the east of Berlin, left for school but didn't come back. Her worried parents filed a missing person's report, but the girl showed up the next day. Soon, the social networks filled with reports that the middle school student had been kidnapped and raped by several Middle Eastern men who had lured her into a car, promising to drive her to school.