The face now of the pro-Russian separtists in Eastern Ukraine is 43-year-old Igor Strelkov. The Russian media fell in love with Strelkov this April, when his armed group took control of the town of Slavyansk, escalating the conflict from a war of nerves into an actual full-fledged war. And Strelkov has become a fixture in the Western media too ever since pro-Russian separatists shot down Malaysian Flight 777. Western journalists and commentators, from the New York Times to the State Department, glean facts from Strelkov’s page on the Russian social-media network “VKontakte.” That’s where the message about the downed Ukrainian military transport plane first appeared: “We warned them not to fly in ‘our sky.’”
But in fact, Strelkov does not run the social media pages that generate these quotes.
