Excerpt:
There are independent reports about something taking place in the early hours of Aug 7, though they suggest rather that an FSB officer died in a drunken brawl between Russian border guards and Russian FSB officers. There is nothing at all to back the claims about the second night and supposed shelling from Ukraine. The hysteria from Moscow and the Russian media were difficult to take seriously for another reason. The alleged incidents had been preceded by Russian moves to block access to independent Internet websites and coincided with Russia’s deployment in occupied Crimea of a huge amount of military technology.
The only ‘evidence’ was from videoed ‘confessions’, first from Yevhen Panov, a driver from Zaporizhya, who looked obviously beaten, then Andriy Zakhtei. Both men have since retracted any ‘confessions’ and described in detail the torture used to obtain them.
Then on August 12, a young Crimean Tatar Ridvan Suleymanov was shown on Russian TV ‘confessing’ to having been recruited by Ukraine’s military. On the video, Suleymanov asserts that he was recruited by Ukrainian military intelligence in 2015 and given the pseudonym ‘Joseph’. He was ordered to gather information, and told to find himself a job at the airport or railway station to report on the movement of military technology. Read More
On April 26, 1986, a routine safety test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine spiraled out of control. Follow the dramatic events that led to the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster. (RFE/RL's Denis Artamonov, Stuart Greer)
This ends our live blogging for April 25. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.