Ukraine Unspun

A day before the October 26 parliamentary elections in Ukraine, hackers accessed electronic billboards in Kyiv and broadcast gruesome images of what they portrayed as civilian carnage wrought by Ukrainian forces battling pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.

Russian state-owned Channel One television then aired a report on the stunt, describing the photographs as “horrifying images of the events in Donbas,” a reference to the Donetsk and Luhansk areas where separatists control of swaths of land.

At least one of these images, however, pre-dates the Ukraine conflict by nearly two decades. It originally showed a Russian soldier standing over mass graves of civilians in Chechnya in 1995 during Russia's own bloody battle with separatists in the restive North Caucasus republic.

The image was snapped by photographer Alexander Nemenov on March 31, 1995, at an Orthodox cemetery in Chechnya's capital, Grozny, according to the AFP photo archive. The bodies were those of civilians "killed in winter fighting" that were "exhumed for identification," according to AFP.

The soldier was cropped out of the image broadcast October 25 on the Kyiv billboards. Only the dozens of decaying bodies sprawled out in a shallow ditch were shown from the original photograph.

A group calling itself "Cyber Berkut" took credit for the billboard cyberattack.

It was not the first time that disturbing images of violence in the North Caucasus have been passed off as evidence of atrocities by Ukraine’s government in the conflict.

In May, state-owned Russian broadcaster Rossiya-1 used video material aired 18 months earlier in a report on an antiterrorist operation in the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. The footage was used to suggest that Kyiv forces murdered a civilian to intimidate separatists in the Donetsk region.

Kremlin-appointed media boss Dmitry Kiselyov later called the broadcast "an error" but "in no way a manipulation." He said that "young, nymph video technicians" were responsible.

Footage of the hijacked electronic billboards aired by Channel One included the image of the mass grave in Chechnya.

The hackers’ montage flashed other photographs of the dead and maimed as well, alternating these images with headshots of Ukrainian politicians, including Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whose People’s Front Party was running neck and neck with President Petro Poroshenko's bloc to win the election, according to partial results as of October 27.

Each politician’s photograph in the video was embossed with a red stamp reading, "War Criminal."

The United Nations has accused both the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists of abuses in the seven-month-old conflict, while rights group like Amnesty International charge that both sides have engaged in torture, shelling of civilian areas, and summary executions.

John Dalhuisen, the Europe and Central Asia director at Amnesty, singled out the Russian media last week for its reporting on atrocities, saying that "some of the more shocking cases" it has reported "have been hugely exaggerated."

Cyber Berkut takes its name from the disbanded Berkut riot-police force, which has been implicated in the February killing of 100 protesters in Kyiv during street protests against then-President Viktor Yanukovych.

The group claimed responsibility for cyberattacks on NATO websites earlier this year.

-- Carl Schreck

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.