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. 
 
 Now Russian bloggers and opposition activists are accusing Channel One of manipulating its viewers’ minds. “On seeing the horrors of such inhuman torture, an ordinary viewer would have only one intention: to join the volunteer forces and ‘seek revenge against the Ukrainian fascists,’” Nemtsov wrote on his Facebook page. Navalny, a former candidate for Moscow mayor, insisted that misinformation on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine has become just as important as combat operations. 
 
 Over the last few months, any criticism of Russian state politics in Ukraine has been greeted harshly by pro-Kremlin patriotic organizations, which have condemned critics as betrayers of the Russian people. Both Nemtsov and Navalny have appeared on lists of “Fifth Columnists,” or traitors, for their opposition views. On Monday, activists from the art collective Glavplakat bicycled along anti-Putin marchers’ favorite protest routes wearing masks depicting the faces of opposition leaders and T-shirts with gay pride rainbows across their chests. The collective’s public action, dubbed “The Fifth Velo-column,” carried with it a message for Muscovites: “Strangers are still among us.” To many Russian intellectuals who disagree with the politics of the Kremlin but are still patriotic, such actions appear intimidating and hostile. 
 
 Who is more of a Russian patriot, someone who demands better quality television or someone who goes to the front as a volunteer to join the Russian Spring movement and fight the Ukrainian army? “Of course volunteers going to the front show real patriotism for Russia and the Russian nation,” said Sergei Surkov, a young Russian nationalist in St. Petersburg who said he planned to join the Rezerv Patriotic Club, a recruiting and training organization, to prepare dozens of young people for combat in Ukraine. 
 
 “Most of the guys I know decided to join the fighting in Ukraine after the Odessa fire,” Surkov, a former history student at Moscow State University, told The Daily Beast. “When I hear on television how Ukrainians are killing children, my blood boils.” ||||| Maxim Stulov / Vedomosti 
 
 Russian state-run television station Channel One has come under fire after airing what was reported to be an eyewitness account of a 3-year-old boy having been tortured and crucified by the Ukrainian military in a public square in Slovyansk. 
 
 In a report that aired Saturday, a woman named Galina Pyshnyak claimed to have witnessed the grisly incident. At the time, she was speaking with Channel One from a refugee camp in Russia's Rostov region. 
 
 In the immediate aftermath of the broadcast, a number of prominent politicians, bloggers and journalists reacted to the report with suspicion and indignation, saying it represented a new low for Russia's state-run media in the ongoing information war over Ukraine. 
 
 "For the sake of their goal, these scumbags from the Kremlin and Channel One are prepared to surpass even [Joseph] Goebbels. And they already have," opposition politician Boris Nemtsov wrote on his Facebook page Sunday. 
 
 As Pyshnyak told it, Ukrainian troops nailed a 3-year-old boy to a post in a city square, slit his sides open and forced his mother to watch as he bled out. 
 
 The mother was then tied to a tank and dragged through the square, Pyshnyak said. 
 
 Critics have argued that the report was a complete work of fiction. 
 
 "Are they completely sick to come up with something like that? … The people who orchestrate such things are dangerous for society, and what they are doing is a crime," opposition campaigner Alexei Navalny wrote on his blog Sunday. 
 
 Several journalists suggested that inspiration for the story — if it is indeed fictional — may have come from Alexander Dugin, a ultraconservative political scientist with known ties to the Kremlin. 
 
 On July 9, Dugin posted a story almost identical to Pyshnyak's via Facebook, though in that account the victim was six years old and the father was also executed. 
 
 Channel One has yet to comment on the matter. A request for comment sent Monday afternoon remained unanswered by print time. 
 
 Pyshnyak claimed that there had been several witnesses to the event. Yet there has been no video confirmation that such a killing took place — something critics have seized upon as a sign of foul play. 
 
 Russian journalist Yevgeny Feldman of the opposition-minded Novaya Gazeta newspaper went to the scene of the purported incident in Slovyansk to ask residents whether they'd seen or heard of any such atrocity. In a nine-minute video posted on YouTube, the local residents he approached consistently said that no such scene had occurred. 
 
 "This is the first I'm hearing of it, from you," one woman said. 
 
 Alan Cullison of The Wall Street Journal, who was in Slovyansk the day after the execution was alleged to have taken place, also said he had heard nothing of the sort. 
 
 "I spoke with dozens of people, but strangely, none of them mentioned anything about the crucifixion of a 3-year-old boy," Cullison wrote on Facebook on Monday. 
 
 Other journalists have poked holes in the story as well. Although Pyshnyak said the incident occurred in Slovyansk's Lenin Square, critics have asserted that the city has no square by that name. Rather, the city has an October Revolution Square. Many have also asserted that all contact information available for Pyshnyak online says she is from Donetsk, not Slovyansk. 
 
 
 
 See also: 
 
 Russian Investigators Target Ukraine Minister in 'Organized Murder' Probe
– Viewers of Russian state TV recently learned about a 3-year-old boy nailed to a board by Ukrainian officials in front of his mother; it was "just like Jesus," the report said. Afterward, the mother, who was said to have committed a crime, was reportedly dragged around a central square in Slovyansk behind a tank. It's a story that would shock any viewer, but the thing is: There's no indication that it actually happened, Russian opposition leaders say, per the Daily Beast. They suggest the story was made up to stir anti-Ukraine sentiment. Russia's most popular TV station cited just one witness, and opposition figure Boris Nemtsov is calling the story "dangerously false." A Wall Street Journal reporter did some investigating of his own: "I spoke with dozens of people, but strangely, none of them mentioned anything about the crucifixion of a 3-year-old boy," Alan Cullison noted, according to the Moscow Times. A Russian journalist's video comes to a similar conclusion, the Times reports. But "on seeing the horrors of such inhuman torture, an ordinary viewer would have only one intention: to join the volunteer forces and ‘seek revenge against the Ukrainian fascists,'" Nemtsov posted on Facebook.