[mvd]

Bij een tussenkomst in de Amerikaanse senaat gebruikte senator Jim Inhofe foto's van ''Russische tanks die Oekraïne binnenrijden'', om zijn collega's te overtuigen Oekraïne te bewapenen. Hij gebruikte deze foto's als onomstotelijk bewijs. Twee uur later bleek het echter te gaan om foto's uit 2008 (Georgië). Deze foto's zouden aan Inhofe zijn overhandigd door Semen Semenchenko, Oekraïens parlementslid en aanvoerder van het Donbas Volunteer Assault Battalion.

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When Senator James Inhofe took the floor of the Senate on Wednesday to argue for arming the Ukrainian military, he brought with him what he called indisputable proof of Moscow’s support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine — a poster with three large photographs of “Russian tanks entering Ukrainian territory.”

In his prepared remarks, Mr. Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, said the images of “Russian troops in T-72 tanks, B.T.R. armored personnel carriers, and B.M.P. infantry fighting vehicles entering eastern Ukraine” constituted evidence of “an invasion of the Ukraine by Russia.”

While none of his colleagues made any objection, just minutes after Mr. Inhofe had finished speaking a friendly conservative news outlet his staff had provided the same images to, The Washington Free Beacon, acknowledged that “serious questions have been raised about the authenticity of some of the photographs” by bloggers with access to Google Image search.


Two hours later, as Gawker reported, a group effort to vet the photographs had revealed that one of the images, taken in October, showed separatists in Ukraine, while the other two did show Russian troops, but driving near Russia’s border with Georgia more than six years ago during the brief conflict in South Ossetia.

In a news release posted online in advance of his speech, Mr. Inhofe said that the photographs “were given to me by Lt. Col. Semen Semenchenko, the commander of Donbas Volunteer Assault Battalion and newly elected member of the parliament of Ukraine, during our meeting on 13 Nov. last year” in Washington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/14/wo...tion.html?_r=0