"F-ck propaganda," American porn star Sasha Grey tweeted on Wednesday. "I love my Russian fans, but this propaganda takes it too far."
Grey became the new face of an anti-Kiev propaganda campaign on Tuesday, when a photo of her published alongside a supposed sob story from the battlefield went viral on Russian social network VKontakte.
The story says that a nurse named "Sasha Serova" was captured by Ukrainian military forces, who then filmed themselves "humiliating" her before chopping her body up with an ax. Notably, the last name "Serova" is similar to the Russian word for "gray."
The post, which received more than 3,500 likes in its first day online, may actually have been a sick joke, but propaganda and misreporting have played a serious role in public perception of the Ukraine conflict.
U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe, who supported an initiative to send lethal aid to the Ukrainian military, last week showed photos to the Senate that he said offered indisputable proof of "Russian tanks entering Ukrainian territory."
But those photos were soon revealed to have been from Russia's 2008 conflict with Georgia, The New York Times reported. Inhofe later blamed a Ukrainian delegation of officials and senior military commanders for having provided him with the photographs, BuzzFeed reported.
Russian television's state-run Channel One, the country's most-watched station, famously reported last year that a young boy was "crucified" by Ukrainian troops. The channel, which has often been accused of running stories aimed at advancing Russian interests in the region, later admitted that the story — initially attributed to an unnamed local resident — may have been that anonymous source's "sick fantasy."
This is not the first time Grey has found herself mired in propaganda.
Grey, whose real name is Marina Ann Hantzis, tweeted in December 2013 for Ukraine to "stay strong" during the Kiev protests that later ousted former pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych.
At the time, Russian-language bloggers blasted the sentiment, accusing her of supporting the pro-Western protesters exclusively.
She tweeted Wednesday that the emergence of the latest meme had flung her to the opposite end of the propaganda spectrum. She had once been lambasted for her alleged support of the protest movement in Kiev, and was now being glorified for her doppelganger's supposedly grisly death at the hands of Kiev-loyal forces.
"So to make it clear, first I was the enemy and now I'm a friend because this [the killing of the nurse] was supposedly the fault of Ukrainians," she wrote in an exasperated tweet.
Contact the author at p.spinella@imedia.ru
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