DISINFO: The West ignored the murder of a 6-year old child in a Ukrainian bombing in Donbas
SUMMARY
These are the values of the West: an attack by Kyiv in Donbas killed a 6-year old child and the West did not comment. Neither the executors of the attack nor their Western backers minded that one of the victims was this child. A statement by the French and German foreign ministers Jean-Yves Le Drian and Heiko Maas didn’t mention this, it only showed their concern by the escalation of the conflict and its support to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and denounced Russia for moving troops inside Russian territory.
The death, or rather the murder, of this innocent child is already being investigated by the UN, while the incident has been silenced by the media.
RESPONSE
This is a deliberate disinformation narrative about the Ukrainian army and the West, without a factual basis. While it is true that on April 6, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine confirmed the death of a child “due to blast trauma and shrapnel wounds”, according to research by Russian and Ukrainian journalists who investigated the incident his death was not the result of a bombing by the Ukrainian army but an accident with explosives or old ammunition,.
Pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets such as RT German had initially spread information that a child allegedly died as a result of a Ukrainian drone attack in the NGCA [Non-Government-controlled-area] of Donbas, in the village of Oleksandrivske. The claim about a drone bombing was debunked by military expert Oleksandr Kovalenko, who wrote that an unmanned aircraft could not reach Oleksandrivske because the distance from the village to the government-controlled territory is about 30 kilometres. Then, the narrative in these pro-Kremlin disinformation pieces in Spanish language ignored the alleged presence of a drone and shifted the claim towards a generic “bombing” of unspecified origin.
According to the comprehensive debunk of the Ukrainian Fact-Checking Group StopFake, the boy died as a result of an accident while handling explosive elements. This is confirmed by statements of eye-witnesses from the respective village within the debunk of StopFake, as a previous debunk in our database reflects. While Russia’s Investigative Committee launched its own probe on the incident, it is not true that the UN is investigating it. Press agency AFP initially wrote about the allegation, but concluded that it couldn’t be verified.
Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Oleg Nikolenko affirmed that fakes about murdered children are an integral part of Russian psychological operations against Ukraine, and recalled the infamous false crucifixion of a child in Sloviansk. On July 12, 2014, Pervy Kanal showed an interview with a woman who claimed to be a local of Sloviansk in Eastern Ukraine. The woman described how she had seen a three-year child being crucified by Ukrainian nationalists while his mother was forced to watch. The story was one of the peaks of the Kremlin-orchestrated campaign targeted at inciting hatred against Ukrainians. Journalists from Novaya Gazeta debunked the story, and other testimonies disproving the story by Pervyi Kanal appeared. In December 2014, Channel One's presenter recognised herself that "journalists did not have and do not have evidence of this tragedy". The false story of the crucified boy has reached at least 250 million viewers worldwide.
See other examples in our database, such as the claims that by provoking Russia, Ukraine fills the role assigned by NATO, that the US may be sending Ukraine to a meat grinder in Donbas, that Ukraine intends to commit genocide in Donbas, or that by accusing Russia of playing a role in Donbas, Ukraine has renounced the Minsk agreements.
This disinformation message appeared in the same TV programme and article as the claim that “The escalation in Donbas is part of a Western destabilisation pattern in post-Soviet states”.