Weidel & Wagenknecht are lying: This boy attacked the Ukrainian soldiers, not the other way around.

A mob attacked a house belonging to the Ukrainian National Guard. This 14-year-old was among them and threw stones at them. When he fell from a fence, the Ukrainian soldiers even treated him. But the pro-Kremlin liars Weidel and Wagenknecht turn the boy into an alleged victim of a “torture cellar” run by Zelenskyy and a “victim” of the Ukrainian army. This is probably yet another pro-Russian staged operation. This is how naive they think you are! We reconstruct what really happened and how brazenly the two Kremlin mouthpieces once again twist the facts in order to turn the victims of Russia’s war of aggression into perpetrators, so that Germany stops its support – presumably so that war criminal Putin can win the war.

What really happened?

The facts: On November 2, people incited by fake news attacked a house belonging to the Ukrainian National Guard in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka near Kyiv, where, among others, four deserters who had been brought back were being housed. Soldiers were injured, and four police cars and a bus were damaged. The 14-year-old whose photo subsequently went around the world was part of the crowd: Videos show him throwing stones at the building, climbing onto the fence and falling into the courtyard, where Ukrainian soldiers treated him. The attack was triggered by a woman who claimed to be an emergency paramedic but, according to investigations, runs a beauty clinic and whose “emergency service” has not existed since 2023. The police denied her claims that same day, and the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU arrested her and two suspected co-organizers. So far, there is no evidence of any mistreatment of the deserters, apart from pro-Russian allegations – and they are known for their unscrupulous lies.

The fake: One day later, the well-known pro-Russian spreaders of lies, AfD leader and far-right extremist Alice Weidel and BSW founder Sahra Wagenknecht, shared a post by pro-Russian propagandist Glenn Diesen, who lies extensively and swaps perpetrators and victims: The boy throwing stones becomes an alleged victim of the Ukrainian National Guard, the attacked house becomes a “torture chamber” belonging to Zelenskyy, and the mob becomes a popular uprising against NATO. Weidel demanded that the federal government “address this” during Zelenskyy’s visit to Berlin. Wagenknecht asked: “Is this what defending ‘our values’ looks like?” No, it is merely your systematic dissemination of Kremlin lies.

A real problem (Ukraine’s controversial mobilization practices, which we will come to later) is blown up into evidence against the entire country with a picture taken out of context and invented details. Within one day, the narrative traveled from anonymous Telegram channels via the Russian state news agency TASS to the timelines of the Bundestag’s two best-known Kremlin apologists. This is how brazenly you are being lied to in order to manipulate you.

A mob attacked soldiers outside the house near Kyiv

Let us begin with what can be substantiated by videos, police reports and journalists on site. Petropavlivska Borshchahivka is a suburb west of Kyiv. A National Guard unit housed soldiers in a rented private house there: newly mobilized men waiting to be transferred to training centers, as well as four men who had left their unit without permission and had been brought back. The corps itself announced this on the evening of November 2. According to t-online, National Guard Commander Oleksandr Pyvnenko spoke of around 20 soldiers in the house.

At noon on November 2, Telegram channels and TikTok streams spread the claim that around 40 people were being held and tortured in the basement, and that one was already dead. Kyiv region police responded because a woman claiming to be a paramedic with a private emergency service reported that she was being denied access to a patient.

Mob incited by unverified rumors

That did not stop the crowd. According to a count by Kyiv Independent reporter Francis Farrell, who was on site, a crowd gathered in front of the house, mostly young men, along with women and teenagers. They threw stones and other objects. When the soldiers were taken out of the house and put onto a bus, the crowd tried to attack it.

Late that evening, the head of the presidential office, Kyrylo Budanov, personally appeared at the scene. He took more than ten people from the crowd into the house, including the alleged paramedic and the streamers supporting her. What was found: no dead person, no torture cellar, no 14-year-old prisoner. Four soldiers who wanted medical attention were taken to a National Guard hospital.

Whether these four men were mistreated in the house is being investigated. The State Bureau of Investigation, DBR, has opened an investigation. Military ombudswoman Olha Reshetylova is examining whether the rights of the mobilized men were violated. The Interior Ministry denies torture. According to the Tagesspiegel, there is currently no evidence of this. A video of a man with bruises shown by the woman to the police is unverified. If investigators establish that mistreatment occurred, it must be investigated and punished, and we will add that information here. But the Kremlin lie is extremely far from that.

The boy in the photo threw stones himself and fell from the fence

Now to the image circulated by Weidel and Wagenknecht. According to Ukraine’s “Child Services Department,” the 14-year-old seen there went to the crowd after school. Francis Farrell of the Kyiv Independent filmed people in the crowd handing him bricks, which he then threw over the fence. Eventually, he climbed onto the wall, lost his balance when the crowd shook the fence, and fell into the courtyard. Another video shows him climbing over the wall onto the premises. The boy is the same in all the footage, identifiable by his green trousers and sneakers.

The National Guardsmen took him into the house, treated him and shielded him from the stones thrown by his own fellow protesters, according to accounts by the police and National Guard. Budanov spoke with him, called his sister and arranged for an adult to pick him up. When asked how he had entered the house, the boy reportedly answered Ukranews that he had “come with a few friends.” It was precisely at that moment, wrapped in a blanket, distraught and with tears in his eyes, that the photo was taken which, just a few hours later, went around the world in the Kremlin lie as that of the “youngest torture victim.”

Of course, we do not know exactly what happened once and for all. But even under the worst interpretation of his own version, this is not true: that he was a torture prisoner, that he was “found,” or that he was among the “40 forcibly mobilized men.” He was a 14-year-old who got caught up in a riot instigated by adults with a fake story. The fact that children get caught up in such a situation is what is truly disturbing about the image. But Weidel and Wagenknecht are exploiting him for their perfidious political agenda.

Weidel and Wagenknecht turn the attacker into the victim and share an RT commentator to do so

And now to what was made of this night in Germany. The post shared by both politicians came from Glenn Diesen. Diesen is a professor in Norway, regularly appears as a commentator on the Russian state broadcaster RT according to the Tagesspiegel, and spreads the lie that the West provoked Russia’s attack. Ah, poor Russia, it was forced to launch an illegal war of aggression and commit war crimes! His text is accordingly full of lies: no torture chamber, no 40 prisoners, no 14-year-old victim, and the “riots” were directed against soldiers managing mobilized men, not against NATO.

Alice Weidel once again willingly spread a lie and wrote on November 3: “I expect the federal government to address this today in Berlin during Zelenskyy’s visit.” By that point, Ukrainian police had already denied the story of dead people and hostages many hours earlier, and journalists on site had published the videos of the boy throwing stones. It would have taken a single search. Weidel did not care. It is still online. No correction, no update, nothing. Weidel is also a far-right extremist who built her career on lies and systematically deceiving the public.

Sahra Wagenknecht, also known for spreading pro-Kremlin lies, followed up the same day: “Is this what defending ‘our values’ looks like?” She said the federal government shared responsibility through its arms deliveries. A day later came an “addendum”: It was now known that the boy pictured had been “injured during the protests against the recruitment prison, contrary to what was initially reported,” and was not among the “forcibly mobilized men and deserters” who “were being held there by the far-right Azov unit.”

Pro-Kremlin liars want to manipulate you deliberately

Do not be fooled: She admits that the central image is wrong and, in the same breath, repeats the entire remaining narrative: “recruitment prison,” “forcibly mobilized men,” “held.” It does not say that the original post about the “torture chamber” and the “40 prisoners” was completely fabricated. It does not say that the story was probably staged. The original post with the fake image was not deleted; it remains in 161,000 timelines, while according to the screenshot the addendum has not even reached 24,000 views. This is not a correction. It is a fig leaf that can later be used as an excuse (“But I did correct it!”), while the fake continues to spread. Anyone who seriously wants to correct something deletes the false post or presents the correction at least as prominently as the error. Neither happened.

It is no coincidence and no first that these two are ruthlessly spreading this Kremlin lie. Far-right extremist Weidel also blames Ukraine for Russia’s attack, denied on Maischberger that Putin was a dictator, and sowed doubt about the mass graves in Izium. We have compiled it here. According to t-online, the Russian Interior Ministry presented her Bundestag speech to police officers as training material.

https://volksverpetzer.de/aktuelles/alice-weidel-extrem/

Four days before the invasion, Wagenknecht declared that Putin would not attack; on “Hart aber fair” she relativized Russian war crimes; her “peace demonstration” was celebrated by Russian state television; and we already documented in 2022 how she spreads lies and conspiracy myths in Putin’s interests. When someone like this shares a post by RT regular Diesen, it is not a slip-up. It is routine.

https://www.volksverpetzer.de/aktuelles/wagenknecht-fuer-putin-sieg/

They blame Ukraine for the recruitment. Who, then, is responsible for Ukraine having to recruit soldiers to defend itself against Putin’s soldiers? Not the federal government, which supplies Ukraine with weapons. Putin, who fires them at Ukraine. This is a perfidious inversion of perpetrators and victims.

The fake “emergency paramedic” behind the mob

Where did the fake story come from in the first place? ArmyInform, the agency of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense (and therefore a party to this matter, to be read with appropriate caution), traced its development: The earliest post found, at 11:34 a.m. on Threads, spoke of four beaten men in a house. Sixteen minutes later, there were 40 people in the basement.

The face of the story was Valentyna Moloda, who knelt in front of running phone cameras beside a vehicle with an emergency-service logo, spoke of spinal fractures and dying people in the basement, and begged the police to let her reach the injured. The only problem: According to investigations by the Ukrainian investigative platform Slidstvo.Info, cited by the Kyiv Independent, Moloda runs a beauty clinic. The company “Med-Prestige,” whose logo was stuck to the vehicle, ceased operations in 2023, according to its former owner, and the vehicles were sold. The “ambulance” was a prop.

A deliberately incited crowd?

On November 3, Moloda was arrested; the following day, a Kyiv court ordered her held in pretrial detention. On November 4, the SBU announced that it had arrested three suspected organizers. According to investigators, on October 30 a woman hired Moloda and a man to lure a particular National Guardsman out of the house under the pretext of a medical emergency. At the scene, Moloda allegedly spread manipulative claims on social media to incite the crowd. According to the SBU, investigators found chats on her phone discussing scenarios for actions against soldiers.

To be fair: These are allegations by the investigative authorities, not a verdict. And the Kyiv Independent expressly writes that as of November 3 there was no verified information about whether and how Moscow controlled the affair. But one thing is certain: The blogger Olha S. was beside Moloda at the scene; according to Radio Svoboda, she has been spreading pro-Russian narratives about “Ukraine’s guilt for the war” for years and is under investigation by the SBU.

She was allowed into the house and later said herself in a video that she had seen no signs of violence. That did not slow the story down. And Budanov made clear the next morning that the events were “unacceptable for the state” and undermined Ukrainian unity in the face of the Russian threat. Provocations would be prevented.

The problems with Ukrainian mobilization

Do not get me wrong: The fact that this rumor brings 200 people onto the streets within hours has a kernel of truth. Ukraine has been waging a defensive war against the vastly superior aggressor Putin for almost five years. Men aged 25 and over can be drafted, and the practices of recruitment centers are highly controversial. Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets reported increasing complaints to parliament about possible violations of the law by recruitment officers.

He calls it a “systemic crisis.” In Ukraine, the term “busification” has become established for picking men up in the street and transporting them away in minibuses. The BBC has reported on this, the Kyiv Independent describes a leadership that has consistently avoided necessary reforms, and violence against recruitment officers is increasing. According to t-online, Lubinets himself says mobilization is necessary, but unlawful methods are not: “If you believe that this improves the situation at the front, the opposite is true.”

We can discuss problems, but the Russians, Weidel and Wagenknecht lie

All of this is reported in Ukrainian media, denounced by Ukraine’s ombudsman and debated in the Ukrainian parliament. It is not a suppressed truth that the Russian propaganda apparatus had to bring to light. This may also be how the Kremlin incited the crowd: Take a real unease and attach an invented horror detail to it. A tortured child. Forty hostages in the basement. The people standing outside the house on November 2 believed it because they knew friends, brothers or sons who had been recruited. The rumor tapped into real anger. That is why it was so effective. And that is why recruitment is being fiercely debated in Ukraine.

Only this: Ukrainians are conducting this debate, using Ukrainian figures, about their own country. Wagenknecht and Weidel are not. They use it to weaken support for Putin’s victim in this country. They instrumentalize the problems with lies caused precisely by Putin’s war. Neither of them has ever proposed how Ukraine could organize its defense in accordance with the rule of law. Their point is a different one, and Wagenknecht states it openly: The federal government should stop supplying weapons. The misery of mobilization is supposed to prove that Ukraine does not deserve support. The fact that mobilization is necessary at all because Russia has been invading the country since 2022 is the greatest mockery. Mobilization can end immediately if Putin stops trying to kill Ukrainians and conquer the country. But Wagenknecht and Weidel want Putin to be able to win this war.

Conclusion: The boy fell from the fence while throwing stones, the staging came from the Kremlin environment, and Weidel and Wagenknecht amplified it

The facts once again: In the house in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, the National Guard housed around 20 soldiers, including four deserters who had been brought back. There was no dead person, no 40 hostages and no tortured 14-year-old. This had been disproven before Weidel and Wagenknecht posted. The boy in the photo was part of the crowd, threw stones, climbed onto the fence and fell. Whether the soldiers in the house were mistreated is being investigated. There is no evidence so far. Once again, Weidel and Wagenknecht willingly and ruthlessly parroted Kremlin lies intended to manipulate you.

The narrative behind this is older than this boy: Ukraine is supposedly a regime that sacrifices its own people, meaning any assistance to it makes one an accomplice. It is the story Russia has been using since 2022 to erode Western support, and it constantly needs new images. This time it was a crying child wrapped in a blanket. Next time it will be something else. And the two of them will once again be at the forefront. Do not believe a word they say.

Parts of the article were created with machine assistance. How Volksverpetzer uses AI.