This pro-Russian separatist propaganda narrative doesn't seem too major to me, quite frankly, I'm documenting it more as a baseline pattern to compare things to later.
And it is somewhat anomalous - the point that it's worth noting for later - that the second website, ever, to talk about this is none other than Weibo, I don't think I've seen that very much.
In context, the other story I'm chasing right now is a rapidly spreading story that Russian soldier posted a video of himself raping a child on Telegram. It is distantly and somewhat slowly dawning on the "hot-take" Twitter crowd that maybe they shouldn't directly share the damn video.
It seems, contrary to Marcus Aurelius' injunction, it is very easy to "extort a verdict" from such people with merely the force of random events.
In that context, I don't care whether the martyrdom story here is true or not. You would probably need an electron microscope to identify the level of a f**k I give about whether some blue-haired separatist rando actually died or not. She knew what she was getting into.
This is war. People die. And this is someone on the side that kills children and massacres civilians. I am uninterested in the details of her alleged martyrdom.
I'm interested, instead, in how this story is being motivated to political uses - and, presumably, some level of influence-operation usage - in a variety of different cross-platform cases.
It's more interesting, and meaningful, to understand how false readings are developed from true or false facts, than it is to verify the truth or falsity of bare facts that do not develop readings in and of themselves.
The former is properly the practice of information war; the latter is fact-checking, and I am not a fact-checker.