Ukraine Unspun

German Professor Lorenz Haag is what you'd call a Kremlin apologist.

Russian media regularly quotes him as praising President Vladimir Putin's leadership, defending Russia's actions in Ukraine, and urging the West to take a softer line toward Moscow.

"Professor" Haag, however, is by all accounts no professor.

And the organization he allegedly heads, the German "Agency for Global Communications," has also been denounced as bogus.

Dmitry Khmelnitsky, a noted Russian architectural historian based in Berlin, was the first to cast doubt on the purported academic's credentials.

"Professor Lorenz Haag, the head of the Agency for Global Communications, exists only in the imagination of ITAR-TASS correspondents who have interviewed him regularly and for many years in the capacity of 'German expert,'" Khmelnitsky wrote in an October 6 post on Facebook. "There is no such professor in Germany. And no such agency."

Khmelnitsky's allegations have sparked intense speculation on the Russian Internet about Haag's identity, motives, or even existence.

According to Russian blogger Pavel Gnilorybov, the state-run ITAR-TASS agency -- which recently reverted to its Soviet-era name TASS -- created the fictitious professor back in 2007.

"Russian media have always had difficulties with foreign mouthpieces," he wrote. "ITAR-TASS workers went for broke; they made up a German professor with a resume and a title."

Since his alleged creation, "Professor Haag" has been actively solicited by TASS -- more particularly by its correspondent Vladimir Smelov -- and his comments have been republished in a range of Russian newspapers, inducing "Izvestia," "Vzglyad," and "Duel."

Over the years, Haag has backed the Kremlin's stance on South Ossetia, slammed U.S. plans to deploy missile-defense components in Poland, praised the Soviet Union's role in World War II, and waxed lyrical about the legacy of Yuri Gagarin's space flight.

More recently, in an article published by "Vzglyad" in May and based on a TASS interview, he claimed that many Germans understood "the actions of Russia toward Crimea and the desire of Crimeans themselves" to join the Russian Federation.

The current Ukrainian government, he continued, has "no sympathy" for Russian speakers -- who, he rather oddly declared, inherited their language "genetically."

"For them," he concluded, "Russian land is where Russian people live."

Research conducted by RFE/RL into Haag's academic record failed to produce any result or even indication as to what discipline he allegedly holds a professorship in.

No trace, either, of his Agency for Global Communications.

A picture of Haag, however, does show up on the website of the Institute for Economic Innovation in Chemnitz. The snapshot identifies him as chairman of the institute's scientific advisory board.

Calls placed to the contact number given on the institute's website were answered by a prerecorded message saying it was "not assigned."

Haag also appears to hold the title of "member of the presidium of the Russian Federation of Cosmonauts in Europe, the United States, and Canada."

According to Khmelnitsky, Haag used to work for the so-called Security Academy, a German-based organization with ties to Russian security services.

The academy, he says, was shut down by Moscow in 2008 after being exposed in German media as a recruitment operation for Russia's security service, the FSB.

The allegation appears to have stung Haag.

"What I said in my comments to TASS represent another point of view in Germany, but it is held by many here," he said in remarks published by the Russian news agency on October 10.

Haag also accused Khmelnitsky -- the author of numerous history books -- of falsely posing as a historian.

Russian state media are abuzz with accusations of murder and gang-rape levelled against government forces in eastern Ukraine by a purported Western monitor.

The charges stem from Einars Graudins, a Latvian political activist who, according to Russian media reports, is part of a team of international monitors dispatched to eastern Ukraine by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The "OSCE expert" is also widely quoted as claiming that hundreds of bodies have been exhumed from mass graves in the Donetsk region.

The problem is, Graudins has never worked for the OSCE.

"We are currently checking the identity of this person, but as far as I know at this moment he is not a member of the special monitoring mission in Ukraine," OSCE deputy spokesperson Natacha Rajakovic told RFE/RL. "We have no record and we certainly couldn't confirm any such statements."

The OSCE's chapter in Ukraine later confirmed that he has "no link whatsoever" to the OSCE.

Graudins did visit the grave sites, but only as a group of eight human rights experts from different European countries who accompanied the regular OSCE monitors.

Known for his pro-Russian and anti-American views – his Twitter account describes him as an anti-globalist and a theoretician of Marxism -- Graudins makes no secret of his sympathy for the separatists rebels.

This has not prevented Russian media from misrepresenting his comments, initially published on September 30 in the "Rossiiskaya Gazeta" daily, the Russian government's official newspaper.

The RIA Novosti agency, for instance, ran the headline "OSCE Expert: About 400 Bodies Found in Gravesites Near Donetsk."

The Russian media has been portraying the alleged mass graves as evidence of "war crimes."

Separatist leaders themselves have confirmed the discovery of only 9 bodies in the alleged mass graves.

In fact, what Graudins told "Rossiiskaya Gazeta" is that there are currently about 400 unidentified bodies in the morgues of Donetsk, without specifying their provenance, and that "their number will grow as the exhumations are conducted at the discovered graves."

"Rossiiskaya Gazeta" itself did not balk at putting its own spin on the interview.

The 400 bodies, it said in introductory remarks, belonged to "civilians and executed insurgents." Again, Graudins makes no such claim.

According to Graudins, the international delegation in which he was embedded visited two alleged mass graves, one in the village of Nizhnyaya Krynka, the other at a mine near the village of Kommunar.

The bodies, he is quoted as saying, "lie under a thin layer of earth."

"You can see," he adds, "that the bodies of those killed were hastily thrown into the pit and covered with earth."

Graudins then appears to contradict himself by stating that the bodies were removed prior to the group's arrival due to their "advanced stage of decomposition."

In Nizhyaya Krynka, too, he is unable to provide any evidence that the site ever hosted a mass grave.

He only mentions the "unbearable smell," which, he argues, is proof that "not all bodies have been taken out of the ground."

According to him, the delegation was invited to witness the exhumation process.

Rather implausibly for international monitors investigating allegations of mass graves, the team supposedly declined due to what Graudins describes as time constraints.

"You have to understand the situation there is difficult," he adds. "Ukrainian snipers operate in this area."

Graudins then launches into an emotional account of the ordeal allegedly suffered by local residents at the hands of Ukrainian troops.

"The people of Donbas are still screaming in terror," he says, relating reports that government troops routinely murder innocent civilians "for no reason."

In Nizhyaya Krynka, he claims, the villagers accuse fighters from the pro-Ukrainian "Azov" and "Donbas" battalion of gang-raping every single local woman, including underage girls and elderly women.

"The grief experienced by these women have rendered me speechless," he is quoted as saying.

In a related development illustrating what has been widely denounced as a disinformation campaign in the Russian media, BBC reported that a Russian state television channel is using photos of victims of the MH17 Malaysia Airlines disaster to illustrate its own reports on "mass graves" in eastern Ukraine.