13.08 War Photographer Stenin Accused of Crime That Never Happened

Ukraine’s top-ranking officials, as well as a number of Ukrainian bloggers openly accuse missing photographer Andrei Stenin of torturing and even murdering a Ukrainian soldier.

“This person was witnessing torture and murder in Shakhtarsk. The whole world was outraged by the pictures capturing first a living but wounded soldier, and then the same one, but already dead. We think Andrei Stenin is likely to have abetted terrorists. This is no longer journalism, but aiding and lauding terrorism”, concludes Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to Ukraine’s minister for internal affairs, in an interview to Latvian radio station Baltkom.

It took the Ukrainian government over a week to admit that Andrei was, in fact, captured by the Ukrainian special services, and held in a location still undisclosed.

The pictures Mr. Gerashchenko referred to were probably those of the “crying paratrooper” Andrei Panasyuk, from the Dnepropetrovsk 25th airborne group.However, one quick glance at the photos arranged in a logical order would be enough to see that in all of them the soldier is alive. In the picture with his supposedly dead body, the soldier’s arm is bent, and he is squeezing a cigarette butt with his fingers.