MOSCOW, March 5. /TASS/. The West is creating a fake news industrial complex that is weaponized as an information smear campaign aimed at discrediting Russia, Chairman of Russia’s Federation Council (upper house) International Affairs Committee Konstantin Kosachev said on Monday.

"The key area today is information warfare. Agencies to fight fake news are mushrooming throughout the West. Meanwhile, Russia is routinely branded as a source of fake news," he said during the discussion of an annual report by the upper house’s temporary commission to protect Russia’s state sovereignty and prevent interference in its affairs. "However, when you look closely at what is considered to be false, it becomes obvious that these fake news reports are not disseminated by us, but rather they are spawned by the West… It is the West that actually creates entire fake news factories, which professionally provide its so-called ‘one-hundred-percent hard facts,’ video footage and eyewitness accounts," he emphasized.

According to Kosachev, "traditional diplomacy with regard to Russia has been substituted with information blitzkrieg diplomacy." "Instead of politics and politicians, we are dealing with propagandists and mediators who are using public opinion instead of armies," the senator noted.

He added that information is not labelled "fake news" based on fact, but rather on opinion. "If you call Crimea’s reunification [with Russia] voluntary and legal, you will immediately be caught ‘red-handed’ reporting fake news. The same thing will happen if one rejects aggression, occupation and genocide," the senator said.

According to Kosachev, a classic example to this effect is the 2008 events in South Ossetia, "when a leading American TV channel with millions of viewers showed footage of a Georgian attack saying that it was a Russian one."