How a fog of war, blowing from Moscow, clouded the truth in Crimea

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It was dark night in February last year when the alternate reality designed by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin first descended.

The car I was driving in that night approached a newly erected checkpoint on the road connecting Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, to Sevastopol, the historic base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet. Several balaclava-wearing gunmen approached our car, and one shone a flashlight inside.

My eyes were focused beyond the fighters, however, at two vehicles of types I recognized from more than a decade of reporting on Russia and its military conflicts. One was a green Kamaz troop truck, the kind I'd regularly seen driving around Moscow when I'd lived there, with a little yellow "lyudi" sign on the back to indicate that there were people – soldiers – inside. The second was a squat, modern armoured personnel carrier.

The Russian army, I understood, had arrived in Crimea, which was then still part of Ukraine.

The date was Feb. 27, 2014. I was too uncertain of what the new rules were to take a photograph of the checkpoint, but I was confident enough of what I saw to post on Twitter that Russian soldiers had set up a checkpoint on the road between Simferopol and Sevastopol. It was, for a moment, big news.

And that's when the surreality descended. Later that night, other journalists drove through the same checkpoint. There was no APC, they reported, and the professional-looking soldiers I'd seen were now a ragtag group in mismatching uniforms who claimed they were just locals angry about the pro-Western revolution that had just taken place in Kiev.

The Russian government was also heatedly denying that its troops had moved beyond their bases in Crimea. I started to question what I had seen, and changed the wording of a story I'd filed for The Globe's website.

In the first version, I wrote that I'd seen "Russian soldiers … dozens of kilometres outside their [Sevastopol] base." In the rewrite that ran online and in the next day's newspaper, I changed it to "Russian-backed fighters." It's a formulation The Globe and Mail and many other news organizations still use when reporting about the fighting that subsequently erupted in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of southeastern Ukraine. It's a war between the Ukrainian army and "Russian-backed separatists" – even when those separatists are armed with vehicles and weapons systems that could only have come from Russia, even when Russian mothers say their sons were killed fighting in Ukraine.

In Ukraine, the fog of war is a thick and decidedly man-made mist.

Feb. 27 is now a national holiday in Russia, newly declared as "Special Forces Day" by Mr. Putin, who no longer has any qualms about saying he sent crack troops in to secure the peninsula ahead of a controversial March 16 referendum that led to the Crimea uniting with the Russian Federation. In fact, he brags about it now. (In a promotional clip for a coming Russian TV documentary about the "reunification" with Crimea, Mr. Putin says that he made the decision to seize the peninsula on Feb. 23, just two days after Viktor Yanukovych's pro-Russian government was overthrown by the crowds in Kiev.) The troops, we now know, did arrive on Feb. 27.

A year later – on Feb. 27, 2015, Russia's first-ever Special Forces Day – opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot four times in the back as he strolled across a bridge within sight of the Kremlin walls. Mr. Putin has condemned the attack, and Russian investigators have moved quickly to arrest five Chechens in connection with the killing, one of whom has reportedly already offered a confession.

We're being told that Mr. Nemtsov was killed because he had angered Chechens with something he posted on his blog following the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. His death, then, was a case of Islamic extremists silencing one of their critics.

The murder had nothing to do with Mr. Nemtsov's many years of political opposition to Mr. Putin, or the fact Mr. Nemtsov was working on a report he hoped would prove the direct involvement of the Russian army in the ongoing war in Donetsk and Lugansk.

At least that's the story we're being told today. Experience suggests we might be better off to wait a year, to see what version the Kremlin offers then.