And his response was to "look for me under the mortar fire."
Russia's had a fun time interviewing thousands of Ukrainians. Some refugees, some not refugees. They've been trying to put names to incidents, real or imagined, and link high-ranking people of Ukrainian political parties, oligarchs, governors, mayors, and even unit commanders and individual soldiers to anything they can find. Then they claim universal jurisdiction over any attack on anybody they claim is Russian.
They're flooding Interpol with these allegations.
Take a current case that seems to barely have pinged the DU collective awareness: Savchenko.
A couple of Russian reporters were killed at a LPR rebel checkpoint. The claim was that the site was peaceful; their own video showed they were at the location of a couple of armored vehicles and a couple of troop trucks. There was weapons fire and mortar rounds falling. The claim was that the Ukr soldiers could clearly see the vests the reporters were wearing and decided to shoot at them anyway.
Savchenko is a chopper pilot that the Russians accuse of being a spotter to help kill the reporters at that checkpoint. She is reported to have been on "emergency duty", which means essentially "medic" shuttling. The Russians say her job was to see where mortar rounds were falling and let the soldiers know how to adjust their fire. (At this point the claim that the soldiers could see the reporters' vests vanishes. Those soldiers were launching mortars from far enough away they needed a spotter.)
A day or two later she went missing and the LPR rebels said that they had captured her and were questioning her. She was videotaped and not in great shape, with cuts and bruises. The rebels said she was a "superwarrior" who put up an incredible fight when she was captured. Then she vanished from the media for a while.
She next surfaced when the Russian authorities in Voronezh said that she had crossed the border as a refugee without documentation. They claim that she had a map with quadrants from the area of the reporters' death that she'd used as a spotter. That she had her cell phone, still showing the times and people she'd called as she worked as a spotter on the chopper. That's what the Russian "investigative committee" said, with other evidence coming from the DPR and LPR. Her Russian isn't great, and she uses Ukrainian. They have no explanation why she decided to head across the Russian border instead of back to Ukrainian-held territory. There's no account as to her being taken captive or held by the LPR. She's claimed to have gone AWOL.
On the 10th attempt of the Ukr consular officials to see her they succeeded. It was the day her hunger strike made it into the press. Her story is that she was captured, held, then a bag was put over her head and she was smuggled to Russia, handed over to Russian officials, and they removed the bag when she was in a FSB building. The Russian press, to my knowledge, have yet to report her side of the story.
Her lawyer was one of the "Pussy Riot" lawyers. However he's encountered resistance, as the court appoints another lawyer to work with him, removes that lawyer, appoints another. Ukrainians that have tried to get to see her tend to run into immigration issues. Her sister was about to board a plane and got a call saying not to--word was that the Russians would meet her at the airport and "talk to her" about her testimony, check her stuff and cell phone, and otherwise do everything possible to compromise her.
Yarosh, not exactly a good guy. But this is part of the info war that Russia's engaged in for the last 6 months, part that's going to be waged through Interpol because if Ukr doesn't hand over the person then Russia will for sure file yet another protest. It's part of the rebel-supply war, sending in fighters, firing across the border, the natural-gas supply war, and targeting selected areas of the Ukr economy not for sanctions but punishment (they wait until large shipments of some perishable merchandise is at the border, hold it, then refuse to let it pass--it's spoiled, the company's paid to ship it and now has to pay to dispose of it; simple trade sanctions are cheaper).
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