Ukrainian MP Deletes Hoax Photo She Claimed Showed Victim of ‘Russian Artillery Attack’

Picture of a book Cover Ukrainian politician attempted to pass off as a victim of the conflict in Ukraine ©Twitter

The latest falsified photo posted by an infamous Ukrainian legislator was widely mocked on Twitter by incredulous users.

A widely-shared photo which claimed to show a child victimized by the Russian military has been deleted by the notoriously-mendacious Ukrainian politician who posted it after social media users discovered it was fraudulent.

“There are no children in #Ukraine anymore,” claimed Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament who’s frequently cited in Western media reports on supposed Russian misdeeds. “Pictured: Marc, 8 [years old], just survived a #Russia artillery attack,” she insisted in a since-deleted post which received tens of thousands of likes and retweets.

This Ukrainian member of Parliament posted a photo of a woman tortured and murdered by the nazi regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard a week ago and is passing it off as the Russians’ handiwork

This isn’t a mistake or an aberration—it’s the Ukrainian nationalists’ entire M.O. https://t.co/Layk72i5aS

— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) April 4, 2022

The only problem? The photo was actually over a decade old, as a simple reverse image search shows. In fact, the image seems to have been pulled directly from the Spanish-language cover of a 2008 book called “The Forgotten Man” by novelist Christina McKenna.

It’s far from Vasylenko’s first brush with forgery. As far back as April, she attempted to pass off horrifying war crimes inflicted by the Ukrainian military’s neo-nazi Azov militants as the doing of Russian soldiers.

The notoriously-mendacious legislator is the daughter of Volodymyr Vasylenko, who was at one point not only the Ukrainian Ambassador to NATO and the EU, but a representative to the UN Human Rights Council.

The elder Vasylenko previously sat on the “international tribunal” which oversaw the prosecution of former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević and which openly admitted it wouldn’t prosecute NATO nationals.

Despite the extensive reach of Vasylenko’s false post, only independent and non-Western media outlets fact-checked the incorrect claim. Indeed, no Western media outlets even mentioned the post – perhaps due to the fact that, according to Mint Press News, “most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED).”