[1][2][3] It was then republished in news reports, officially titled "A refugee from Sloviansk recalls how a young son and a wife of a militiaman were executed in front of her".
The spread of the story served to distract from the Donetsk People's Republic's withdrawal from Sloviansk, and the cross-border shelling of Ukraine by Russian armed forces.
"[9][10] The spread of the news about the "crucified boy" was later used for statistical analysis of the expansion of fake information in modern social networks and search engines.
[16] When Elena Racheva asked Russians returning from the Luhansk People's Republic in 2015 why they had gone to the Donbas, some volunteers explicitly cited the crucifixion story.
[17] A similar story was distributed in April 2021 when Russian media widely reported that a Ukrainian UAV killed a boy in Oleksandrivsk village.