Kyiv city authorities used a photo-shopped picture of Moscow to illustrate how snow is being cleaned off the streets. An ITAR-TASS stock photo taken on Nov. 29, 2012, was touched up and posted on the city administration's website on March 24 to illustrate a news item with the headline: “The movement of public transport is being renewed in the city.”
The picture with three
KAMAZ trucks riding side-by-side along a highway and cleaning the
snow was used to illustrate a story that listed bus, trolleybus and
tram routes that were renewed after disruptions following
unprecedented heavy snowfalls in Kyiv on March 22. The truck’s
license plates were photo-shopped to remove the Moscow
identification.
City authorities have been
heavily criticized for failing to prepare for bad weather, despite
multiple warnings from meteorologists. Kyiv City Administrator
Oleksandr Popov said the state of emergency, which was declared on
March 23, will last for at least a week.
A representative of the
city’s press service said the photograph was a technical error.
“It was a technical
error of the site’s administrator because he had been working for a
few days non-stop,” said Anna Slesareva of the city administration
press service.
She said the photograph was removed as soon as the mistake
was identified by Yaroslav Debelyi on facebook, and then reported by bloggers.
The news item, which
remains on the city
government’s website, is now illustrated by a picture of a
tractor working in Kyiv.
