The claim
Russia: Secret service kills STALKER cosplayers because it believes they are Ukrainian spies.
Our conclusion
The claim is true. However, the error was not admitted, but was justified on state television with propaganda lies.
Hello everyone,
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I'm not sure, but this link is circulating quite a lot on Facebook and maybe you can check it out. It sounds a lot like a robber's gun and I couldn't find any other sources on the topic via Google. Best regards and please keep it up.
The mix-up was noticed too late.
Posted by PlayCentral at the Friday, December 2, 2022
Yes, the story about the three STALKER cosplayers and the Russian secret service is true. But how did this come about?
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Media reports about killed Ukrainian saboteurs
On Wednesday, November 23, Russian state media reported that the FSB, Russia's domestic intelligence agency, had eliminated three Ukrainian saboteurs. According to the intelligence services, they were preparing an attack on energy facilities in the city of Voronezh. The Россия-1 (Russia-1) broadcast images showing an apartment with uniforms, weapons, military equipment and bodies of the three men. A supposed banner of a Ukrainian party was also held up to the camera - blurred out this video
It was claimed that it was a banner of the Ukrainian Воля (Volya, meaning freedom) party. And the men would be Ukrainian spies and saboteurs. However, the video images made journalists from the Moscow Times suspicious. They quickly found photos of two of the three men on social media. It turned out that the two were citizens of Voronezh and part of the local airsoft community. Both were fans of the computer game series STALKER, horror first-person shooters set on the site of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine. And they liked to dress like their heroes in the game – cosplayers.
A serious mix-up
The banner in the apartment and patches on the cosplayers' uniforms show the green bear head of the Воля faction in three titles in the STALKER series. These are Ukrainian anarchists who fight for free access to the exclusion zone in the game. Next to the bear's head, the symbol shows the lettering ВОЛЯ (the capital Cyrillic letters read similarly to the English word for bear - BEAR), Ukrainian flag and trident.
The Ukrainian minor party ВОЛЯ uses a very similar font for its banner. The report says this: “Flag of the right-wing extremist nationalist party Volya. Such banners were used by the ultra-right on the Kiev Maidan." The Russian-language Wikipedia names the founders of ВОЛЯ: "Representatives of the 'Volya Initiative' and the 'civil sector of Euromaidan', reform and lustration activists as well as lawyers, journalists, economists and Business representatives”.
It is quite conceivable that the FSB officials drew the wrong conclusions and initially attributed the logo, uniforms, airsoft weapons and the Воля logo from STALKER to potential spies or saboteurs. The Moscow Times from the airsoft community called those killed "strange characters." One was an “anarchist, rebel and supporter of Ukraine,” another an “ordinary techie, hard worker and supporter of Navalny.” That may also have contributed to the serious wrong decision.
It is one thing that the domestic secret service stormed the apartment based on false information and killed the suspects. However, the objects in the apartment must have quickly turned out to be toys and dummies. Russian state media continued to stick to the Ukrainian spies story. The television station Rossiya-1 concealed in its news program the evidence that contradicted the official narrative. This is not evidence of sloppiness or incompetence, but of propaganda.
Sources: Россия-1 , Moscow Times , playcentral.de , ru.wikipedia.org , STALKER Wiki
More fact checks: Pro-Russian propaganda in advertisements on Facebook
Note: This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication
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