Russia is currently being accused of interfering in a number of political events, including the decision of Britain to leave the European Union and the decision of the Americans to elect Donald Trump as their new President.
And now at a meeting on Monday of European Union foreign and defence ministers, Spain have raised the issue of “disinformation and manipulation” coming from Russia during the recent Catalan independence crisis.
Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis said, “I will raise the question of how disinformation and manipulation around the referendum and subsequent events in Catalonia have developed”.
And according to Spain’s Defence Minister, Dolores de Cospedal, it is obvious that a lot of misinformation concerning the Catalan independence crisis was spread by Russia on social media but a definitive link to the government has not yet been proven.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov defended the country by suggesting that Madrid was trying to divert attention from Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.
“Probably they are arranging this kind of scandalous, sensational hysteria in order to distract the attention of their electorate from their inability to resolve their problems at home,” he said at a news conference in Moscow.
