Crucified boy
"Crucified Boy" () was the name of a false anti-Ukrainian atrocity propaganda story which was disseminated in Russia in July 2014, during the war in Donbas. The story was first published by Eurasianist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, On 9 July 2014. It was then republished in a news reports, officially titled "A refugee from Sloviansk recalls how a little son and a wife of a militiaman were executed in front of her," shown on the Russian state-owned Channel One Russia on July 12, 2014. It contained allegations of a public crucifixion of a three-year-old boy performed  by Ukrainian soldiers at "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. The spread of the fake story served to distract from the Russian withdrawal from Sloviansk, and cross-border shelling of Ukraine by Russian armed forces. History. Investigative journalists from the Russian news outlets "Novaya Gazeta" and "Dozhd" who visited Sloviansk did not find any supporting evidence to back up these allegations, nor did they find any audio or video footage of the incidentunusual for the time, since actions  of the Ukrainian army in the city were well documented. BBC News pointed out that there is no "Lenin Square" in Sloviansk, although there is an "October Revolution Square." 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 episodethis "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 Channel One Russia "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 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, saying they had merely relayed a purported eyewitness report. A similar story was distributed in April 2021 when Russian media widely reported that a Ukrainian UAV killed a boy in Oleksandrivsk village. Journalist investigation confirmed a child indeed died in Oleksandrivske as  result of the explosion of a land mine stored unsafely stored in the garage of a village resident, but the UAV narrative was invented by Donetsk People's Republic press service.