
Crucified Boy

"Crucified Boy" (, Raspyaty malchik) was a news report that was officially titled "A refugee from Sloviansk recalls how a little son and a wife of a militiaman were executed in front of her" and was shown on the Russian state-owned Channel One Russia during the war in Donbas, on July 12, 2014. It contained unconfirmed allegations of a public crucifixion of a three-year-old boy performed by Ukrainian soldiers at the Lenin Square in Sloviansk, told by an alleged resident of Sloviansk, Halyna Pyshnyak (, ), a native of Zakarpattya. The story has become a staple example of Russian fake news.
History.
Investigative journalists from Russian outlets Novaya Gazeta and Dozhd who visited Sloviansk and interviewed local residents, did not find any supporting evidence to back up the allegations, nor did they find any audio or video footage of the incident, unusual for the time, since actions of the Ukrainian army in the city were well documented at the time. A BBC News report also said that Sloviansk did not have a Lenin Square, where, supposedly locals were assembled to watch the incident. An investigation of Pyshnyak also reported that her husband was a former Berkut unit member who had joined the separatist unit led by Igor Strelkov.
The report episode was later widely used as an example of disinformation or fake news, that "became the standard" for modern mass media, especially Russian official ones. In Russian mass culture the episode - this "good piece of propaganda" - became a "synonymous for journalist fakes". The spread of the news about "crucified boy" was later used for statistical analysis of the expansion of fake information in modern social networks and search engines.
The former editor of Russian news portal "Lenta.ru" Galina Timchenko said that it was a gross breach of professional ethics by the Russian leading television channels. The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny called the Russian Channel One "nuts" for airing the report. Another Russian opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, stated that it was an attempt to rally naïve people behind the idea a war against Ukraine. Russia Today, which was widely reporting the story on their TV channel and online with headline "Kiev army now literally crucify babies in towns, forces mothers to watch", later deleted the story from their website and denied any previous involvement, however most of copies of their coverage on social media remained in place.
The story was officially retracted by Channel One, which was first to air it, on 21 December 2014, citing merely relaying an alleged eyewitness report.
A similar story was distributed in April 2021 when Russian media widely reported that an Ukrainian UAV killed a boy in Oleksandrivske village. Journalist investigation confirmed a child indeed died in Oleksandrivske as result of explosion of a land mine stored unsafely in a garage of a village resident but the UAV narrative was invented by Donetsk People's Republic press service.