Talk:Andrei Stenin

More Sources

• DPR Commanding Officer: Kirovohrad Special Forces Possibly Linked to Stenin's Death RIA Novosti, September 19

The Kirovohrad special forces might have been involved in the death of International Information Agency Rossiya Segodnya photojournalist Andrei Stenin, a commanding officer of one of the Donetsk People's Republic's military units told RIA Novosti on Friday.

"That night when the connection with the headquarters was restored, we were ordered to return to Donetsk via the city of Snizhne. At 5 a.m. we left Dmytrivka and on our way to Snizhne we came across the Ukrainian troops near the village of Rozsypne. We later found out that it was a unit of the Kirovohrad special forces. Scouts were killed at once, our car was breaking through the ambush. Once we had broken through, we saw the shot-up civilian vehicles," the officer said.

"The Kirovohrad special forces shot everyone. They did not stop the cars to inspect them, they simply shot everyone who was going from Snizhne and Dmytrivka," he added.

"The Kirovohrad special forces shot everyone, which is why speculations linking Stenin's death to independence fighters are a lie. Firstly, there were no independence fighters in that area. We had not been controlling the route where Stenin died since the morning of August 6. The Ukrainian military shelled the area first and then their blocking detachments shot everyone indiscriminately," the commanding officer said. Stenin went missing in eastern Ukraine on August 5. Sources suggested that the Ukrainian military could have detained the journalist, but Kiev never officially confirmed the information. On September 3, Rossiya Segodnya Director General Dmitry Kiselev said that, according to information from the Russian Investigative Committee, Stenin died about a month ago near Donetsk when the car he was traveling in while on an editorial assignment was shot at and torched on a highway just outside the city. A farewell ceremony for Stenin was held on September 5 at the Rossiya Segodnya international press center. Stenin was buried at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

• Kiev Committing War Crimes While Accusing Andrei Stenin of 'Assisting Terrorists' RIA Novosti, September 19

The news of Andrei Stenin's death has evidently exposed the dishonesty and hypocrisy of Kiev's authorities, which had proposed to swap the photojournalist from International Information News Agency Rossiya Segodnya for someone else while his charred body remained lost along the side of a highway after he was killed by the Ukrainian military in the beginning of August.

...the Ukrainian mediators had demonstrated that they were willing to swap Andrei Stenin for the Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, who was charged with aiding in the murder of Russian journalists earlier this year, implying that the Russian correspondent was alive and they were informed of his whereabouts.

...

It is worth mentioning that Anton Herashenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, claimed in an interview with Baltkom radio that Stenin had been arrested on charges of "assisting terrorists." Later, however, he backtracked, claiming that his own statement had been "misinterpreted." In an interview with the Ukrainian channel 112 Ukraine in mid-August, the official called Andrei Stenin a spy and a "terrorist accomplice", who was cold-bloodedly photographing the suffering of Ukrainian soldiers, adding that "hysteria around the name of Stenin" is irrelevant when each day sees the death of a dozen Ukrainian military servicemen. Andrei Stenin's life, noted Herashenko, was not worth more than a life of a Ukrainian soldier.

Ironically, Kiev has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not care much about the lives of its militants, who have been used as cannon fodder in eastern Ukraine since the beginning of the standoff.

More on that interview in Russian: Aug. 16 - Aug. 26 --Caustic Logic (talk) 12:42, 20 September 2014 (UTC)