Evgeny Poddubny, a TV correspondent for TV Center, revived his dusty blog to present his eyewitness account of the war after his nine-day stay in Tskhinvali. “I will tell you what I saw there with my own eyes. At first, I didn’t want to write about it in my LiveJournal,” he wrote, “but after I returned to Moscow and read the stuff being said online, I just couldn’t keep silent.” He then plunges into a self-consciously flat account—“I tried to keep the descriptions as dry as I could”—detailing the war’s progression, paying careful attention to timing and tank formation, as if his precise telling will finally deflate all the conspiracy theories whirling about the blogosphere. Poddubny’s blog isn’t as rhetorically compelling as Steshin’s, but he, too, resorts to graphic imagery to make his points:

An elderly man approached us and, with a gesture, invited us into his house. We walked into the bedroom, he brought us over to the bed - a big double bed - pulled back the cover, and there were his wife and daughter, both burned and headless. Many have said, you guys are only telling us when you could show it.

And so he does.

“Of course, I didn’t include everything,” Poddubny writes at the end of his long, painstakingly detailed account. “I have to gather my thoughts…But!” he adds (and here the paths of journalistic strivings for objectivity and conspiracy theorizing diverge):

But! Georgia made the first military move! Russian forces entered South Ossetia 16 hours after the beginning of Operation ‘Clean Earth’! There was not one Western camera crew in Tskhinvali until the moment that military operations ceased! The Russian air force hit military infrastructure!

Krig42, on the other hand, more gingerly treads the line between skeptical journalist and conspiracy theorist. When Krig42’s videos finally went up on Tuesday, he showed - truly showed - the eerie moonscape of Tskhinvali: A long, rumbling drive down Tskhinvali’s Moscow Street, the early evening sun planing through the trees, falling on rubble. Broken glass still in the panes, black shadows of fires long extinguished climbing up the outer walls. The muzzle of an AK-47 pops briefly into view. An occasional grandmother hobbles along, but otherwise the street is deserted.

There is a clattering reel of a shabby, ill-equipped basement, identifiable as a hospital only because the video titles it as such. A deserted town square. Another video, called “A dead body, briefly,” just one second long, snaps a quick shot of a body in a wide muddy road as trucks detour around it.

Riding along Moscow Street, Steshin offers no commentary. All you hear is the wind and the personnel carrier trundling along. The post is titled, simply, “Watch. Count the ruins, if you want.”

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