Why the story about the Russian journalists and the pipeline explosion is wrong

On 17th of June, a pipeline exploded in Ukraine. A few hours later, a story began making its way through blogs and Facebook: Supposedly, journalists of Russian news station and propaganda outlet Russia Today were on the scene of the explosion already 10 minutes after it happened. The obvious implication: Russians blew up the pipeline and Russia Today was informed previously.

I tried to find the source of the story and realized that there was something wrong about it. I wrote about this in my previous post (in German, see below). It is fascinating how nobody seems to believe I'm right. I'll try to make my case again, in detail.

Facts, upon which all agree:
The pipeline exploded at 14:45 local time.
The report by Russia Today came out at 13.01 GMT.
14:45 local time in Ukraine is 15:45 Moscow time.


The WRONG interpretation by EuromaidanPR and other blogs and hundreds of people sharing it on facebook:

13:01 GMT is 16:01 Moscow time. (look at the picture from EuromaidanPR below.) This WOULD mean that the story came out on Russia Today just 16 minutes after the explosion which would be really suspicious (explosion at 15:45 Moscow time, story from Russia today at 16:01 Moscow time).

The RIGHT interpretation is:

13:01 GMT is 17:01 Moscow time. The story came out 1 hour and 16 minutes after the explosion which is not suspicious (explosion at 15:45 Moscow time, story from Russia today at 17:01 Moscow time).

When the story came out, it was 13:01 GMT, 14:01 in London, 15:01 in Berlin, 16:01 in Kiew and 17:01 in Moscow.

That Moscow is GMT plus 4 is really easy to prove. You can choose whichever website you like to find out about the timezone, really just enter "time zone moscow" in Google. One example would be: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/russia/moscow

But why are so many people confused about this?
The main reason: Because 10000 Facebook likes seemingly means it can't be wrong.
The second reason: There seems to be a misunderstanding about GMT. It is called Greenwich Mean Time, but that doesn't mean that it is always GMT in Greenwich/London. In the summer, London has GMT+1, the British Summer Time.

While it is true that the time difference between the actual London district and Moscow is 3 hours right now, the difference between GMT and Moscow is still 4 hours.

I'm really hoping this clears things up for everybody! I sent this to EuromaidanPR and to stopfake.org, let's see if they will do something about it.

Source: Twitter account of EuromaidanPR