There’s No Evidence the Ukrainian Army Crucified a Child in Slovyansk

[cali]

Particularly vile propaganda. think babies in incubators- even worse.

The scene described on Russian state TV was gruesome: a small boy nailed to a board in eastern Ukraine for a crime his mother committed. But independent sources say it never happened.

The details were horrifying. Ukrainian officials had nailed a 3-year-old, clad in just his underwear, to a wooden board “just like Jesus,” right before his mother’s eyes, according to Russian state television. Then, said Galina Pyshniak, Channel One’s sole witness and a pro-Russian refugee, the military in Slovyansk had grabbed the mother, tied her to a tank, and dragged her three times around the city’s central Lenin Square. “The Ukrainian army are not liberators—they’re bastards,” she said.

“One’s mind refuses to understand how anything like that could happen today in the center of Europe, while one’s heart does not believe that such thing is possible at all,” Channel One’s anchor philosophized.

But Russian opposition leaders said Monday that there was no evidence that such a public execution had taken place in Slovyansk. Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov called the story “dangerously false” and called for the management of Channel One, Russia’s most popular channel, to be put on trial for broadcasting it.

The calls came after the independent Moscow-based newspaper Novaya Gazeta dispatched a reporter, Yevgeny Feldman, to Slovyansk last weekend to search for more witnesses of the alleged execution. “Nobody I spoke with in Slovyansk has heard a thing about this,” he tweeted.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/15/there-s-no-evidence-the-ukrainian-army-crucified-a-child-in-slovyansk.html

[cali]

1. this is a particularly egregious piece of propaganda

vile, dangerous and insane. It's worth noting because it was concocted and broadcast on Russian State TV. If this isn't a good reason to view official Russian news outlets with a jaundiced eye, I don't know what is.

[Igel]

2. And it wasn't even RT but Channel 1.

Channel 1 was the station that broadcast that Yarosh, the right sector leader, won a plurality of the votes in the presidential referendum at 37%, the rightist Svoboda as #2, and between them getting a majority. Even claimed to get the screenshot from the Ukr election site.

Oddly, at the time it was widely reported that the Ukr election computer systems had been the subject of a number of attacks. One was later claimed to have been a virus which was programmed to flip votes and produce a predetermined election result--37% for Yarosh, Svoboda in second place.

That Channel 1 broadcast spurious results, based on absolutely nothing, is established. That the virus really would have produced those results is a claim that can't really be substantiated.

Channel 1 is a rather widely-watched channel in Russia. And often required broadcasting in the LPR and DPR (which has a habit of turning off at the station any tv channels they don't like and resetting the stations to broadcast only Russian state tv. Ukrainian stations, even in Russian, broadcast only lies, you see, while the Russian stations broadcast the truth.)

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As an aside, there was a claim reported in a few smaller Ukrainian sources that didn't get wide circulation about a Ukrainian soldier that was captured and crucified on the front of an APC, only to be paraded through Luhansk. Likewise, no real evidence for this.