US Embassy answers Russian trolls with its own parody

An image circulated widely yesterday on the Russian Internet depicting US Ambassador to Russia John Tefft in attendance at yesterday's opposition demonstration in Moscow. The photograph was fake—Tefft spent Sunday, September 20, at home—but the Photoshop still managed to cause a small stir with gullible Internet users, thanks in part to some media outlets. The television station REN-TV, for instance, even included the image in a report about the demonstration, only later adding a note that the veracity of the photograph had not been determined.

Today, the US Embassy in Russia responded on Twitter with a photo-collage depicting Ambassador Tefft on the Moon and at a hockey game. 

The original photograph of Tefft was taken on February 28, 2015, at the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow, where Boris Nemtsov was murdered earlier this year.

Roughly 7,000 people are thought to have attended Moscow's opposition rally on Sunday, September 20.