“I haven’t seen Russian stories comparable to the rape hoax”
Happy to help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucified_boy
This one was quite the doozy. The woman who reported this is from Western Ukraine who married one of the Sparta Batallion nazis (one of the irregular nazi forces that fought on the DPR side... you know, the “goodies”).
Galina Pyshnyak’s partner had direct links to Motorola, a senior figure in the Sparta who boasted that he’d personally executed several POWs at Donetsk Airport. (Russia doesn’t argue with this, it just points out that he wasn’t regular army so his war crime doesn’t count.)
But anyway. Here’s her version of the story, as reported by a pro-Russian site.
https://slavyangrad.org/2014/07/13/slavyansk-refugee-remembers-brutal-execution/
If you read the first paragraph in that article, you’ll get a sense of how the major Russian news sources initially treated it as gospel.
The DPR is the only authority in either Russian or Ukrainian controlled areas of Ukraine that has used a 1941 law to reinstate the death penalty for unlawful combatants. It’s also the only one that actually admits that if the right person makes an accusation, not a single shred of evidence is needed for them to decide that someone can be prosecuted for it. Of course, if a regional administration takes an accusation that serious, that seriously, no media outlet in its right mind would ignore the story.
Two different Russian agencies thought the story was so horrific and so far outside what’s allowed in the course of a war that it needed to be prosecutable, so they bent over backwards looking for more witnesses, a confession, or even some signs that a tank had been dragging bodies around the square.
I’ll give Russian media credit where credit is due. Having discovered there literally was NO evidence to support the story, they all quietly dropped it.
Yes, but the the difference is that rape hoax was a deliberate government lie intended to “shame” countries into giving weapons to Ukraine and to foment political upheaval in Russia. Nevertheless, I was impressed that the Rada, after it discovered the fraud, took decisive action to repudiate what was done. I think we both agree that in wars extravagant claims of all kinds (atrocities, victories, defeats, etc.) have to be viewed with some skepticism until there’s a reasonable evidentiary basis.