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A Russian soldier claimed in a video that Cesar Quintana died fighting in Mariupol.
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“It’s pure propaganda,” Quintana told The Washington Post, claiming he was alive and in California.
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Quintana traveled to Ukraine last year to try to save his son, who was taken there in 2020.
Although a video posted by a Russian soldier on Telegram claimed he died fighting in Mariupol, Cesar Quintana, the father of a kidnapped two-year-old child, says he is alive in California.
“It’s pure propaganda,” Quintana told The Washington Post of the video, which aired on pro-Russian disinformation channels.
The video, which showed photos of his US passport with written coordinates believed to be the location of his body, was posted by a member of the Russian military who claimed Quintana joined forces with Ukrainians and was kill.
“These are for his relatives, so they can bury him after the fighting is over,” the man said in
Russian, reported the Washington Post. “We are people, and we have to stay that way.”
Quintana was last in Ukraine in December on a trip to save his son from his ex-wife, Antonina Aslanova Quintana, who he says kidnapped the child in 2020 and fled the country. Following an argument with the boy’s maternal grandmother as he tried to send him back to the United States in December, Quintana said his passport was confiscated by Ukrainian authorities. An arrest warrant for child abduction was issued for Aslanova on January 15 this year.
Back in the United States, Quintana told The Associated Press that the last contact with her son was on March 2, less than a week after the invasion began. The child was living with his mother in his grandmother’s house in Mariupol, a besieged city that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described this week as the country’s “worst situation” where “tens of thousands” of civilians were believed to have been you are beautiful.
“I’m ready for anything and everything,” Quintana told The Associated Press. “I just want my son back.”
Quintana did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment.
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