http://www.nytimes.com/...world/europe/scrutiny-over-photos-said-to-tie-russia-units-to-ukraine.html
One series of photographs depicts what Ukraine described as a “soldier of the Russian Special Forces identified in Slovyansk and Kramatorsk during the assault of administration buildings.”
Vyachislav Ponomaryov, the de facto mayor of Slovyansk, who was ushered into office by pro-Russian militants, acknowledged in a news conference on Tuesday that armed men had come to his town from outside Ukraine but vociferously denied that they were Russian Special Forces.
“Not one serviceman of the Russian Federation is on the territory of Slovyansk,” Mr. Ponomaryov said.
“We don’t have any direct contact with the special services of the Russian Federation,” he said. “Everyone you see here in the militia are my friends, my brothers, my allies in the battle with fascism. We have volunteers who came to us from Moldova, from Russia, from Belarus, from Kazakhstan, from the North Caucasus.”
Another series of photographs in the Ukrainian presentation shows a uniformed man with a long beard who was photographed this year in Slovyansk and Kramatorsk and who, the Ukrainians assert, was also photographed during Russian combat operations in Georgia in 2008, wearing a Special Forces patch.
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The Western allegations that Russia has intervened in Ukraine are based on NATO’s analysis of the tactics employed by armed groups in eastern Ukraine; Ukraine’s assertion that it has arrested several Russian intelligence officers; the accounts of local residents and news media reports; and classified information. But the dispute over the group photograph cast a cloud over one particularly vivid and highly publicized piece of evidence.
Maxim Dondyuk, a freelance photographer who was working in Slovyansk principally for the Russian newsmagazine Russian Reporter, said that he had taken the group photograph there and posted it on his Instagram account.
“It was taken in Slovyansk,” he said in a telephone interview. “Nobody asked my permission to use this photograph.”
Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, acknowledged that the assertion that the photograph in the American briefing materials had been taken in Russia was incorrect. But she said that the photograph was included in a “draft version” of a briefing packet and that the information has since been corrected. This photograph, she said, was not among those presented by Mr. Kerry in Geneva.
// propaganda draft version?