Following a falsified lead, Russian television channel Zvezda and other Russian media incorrectly reported that Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs for the United States Department of State Victoria Nuland had bullied Ukrainian children while being a group leader at the Moloda Hvardiya summer camp in 1982. Because of this, she was beaten by the Russian writer Inna Metelskaya-Sheremetieva, who had written about the incident on her Facebook page. According to the writer, she was then expelled from the camp.
The assistant general manager of Moloda Hvardiya, who has been working at the camp since 1982, Vasyl Bezden, refuted the story about the fight to StopFake: “There wasn’t such an incident. If something like that had happened in the national camp, it would have been a great scandal. This was not a camp where you could conceal it.”
There were about 80 group leaders at Moloda Hvardiya at that time, he said, and if something like that had happened with a foreigner, everyone would have known about it.
Nuland had mentioned at a press conference during her last year visit to Odesa that she had been in the summer camp in 1982.
Significantly, Metelskaya-Sheremetieva initially wrote that the incident had happened at the Eaglet summer camp. Then she edited her post and changed Eaglet to Moloda Hvardiya. However, the first variant was reposted by several sites.
The Odesan journalist Yulia Sushenko pointed out that Metelskaya-Sheremetieva had changed her mind after corresponding data was edited on Wikipedia.
