In July, after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, Gontar surveyed the internet, picking up shards of pro-Russian conspiracy theories. In one report, a woman would be an “Odessa resident”, then next she would be a “soldier’s mother”, then a “Kharkiv resident” and then an “anti-Maidan activist”. But soon Gontar would see the same plump women and the same injured men appearing in different newscasts, identified as different people. Russian state-television news began to fill up with plump, weeping women and elderly men who told tales of Ukrainian nationalists beating up Russian-speakers. It felt good being able to sort truth from lies, to feel some kind of certainty amid so much confusion.īut sometimes things could get more complicated. Gontar posted her research on a myth-busting website called StopFake, which had been started in March by volunteers like her at the journalism school of Mohyla University in Kiev. Some of the photographs were actually from other, older wars some were from crime scenes that had nothing to with Ukraine some even came from movies. She could usually locate the original images of the dead with a simple Google search. Now eastern Ukraine was being taken over by separatists.

It was early 2014, Crimea had just been taken over by soldiers who seemed Russian and sounded Russian but who were wearing no national insignia, and who Vladimir Putin, with a little grin, had just told the whole world were not Russian at all. They were all over her computer screens – on news sites and social media – next to headlines that blamed the deaths on Ukrainian fascist gangs trained by Nato. T he thing that Margo Gontar found easiest to deal with were the dead children.

Mind control theatre behind the mirror