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Kramatorsk train station attack: The key to finding the perpetrator lies in this overlooked detail

Kiev and its Western backers immediately blamed Russia for the incident, but a proper investigation is likely to disagree

By Scott Ritter | April 19, 2022

In a conflict where accusations of wrongdoing fly back and forth between Russia and Ukraine on a daily basis, when it comes to the missile attack on the Kramatorsk train station that occurred at 10:30am on April 8, 2022, both sides are in rare agreement–the missile used was a Tochka-U, a Soviet-era weapon known in the West by its NATO reporting name as the SS-21 Scarab, and in the former Soviet republics that use the weapon by its GRAU designation, 9K79.

Beyond that one technical piece of information, however, any semblance of unanimity regarding the narrative surrounding how that missile came to strike a bustling railway station, killing and wounding dozens of civilians desperately trying to evacuate from eastern Ukraine in anticipation of a large-scale Russian offensive, collapses, with each side blaming the other. Making this tragedy even more bizarre, the Russian words Za Detei–“for the children”–had been hand-painted on the missile in white.

The Tochka made its appearance in the Soviet military in 1975. A single-stage, solid-fuel tactical ballistic missile, the Tochka was assembled at the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant before being delivered to the Soviet Army, where it was further disseminated to the various units equipped with the system. An improved version of the Tochka, known as the Tochka-U (Uluchshenny, or “improved”) was introduced in 1989; the improvements included increased range and accuracy.

The Tochka-U operates as a simple inertially-guided ballistic missile. Simply put, the operators, working from a known location, orient the launcher in the direction of their target, and then calculate the distance between the point of launch and point of impact. The solid-fuel engine of the Tochka-U burns for 28 seconds, meaning that the range of the missile isn’t determined by engine burn-time alone, but rather the angle that the missile was launched–the more vertical the missile at time of launch, the shorter its range will be.

Because the missile burns to depletion, once the engine shuts down, the missile will cease its pure ballistic trajectory, and instead assume a near-vertical posture as it heads toward its target. The warhead is released at a designated point above the target. In the case of the Kramatorsk attack, the Tochka-U was equipped with the 9N123K cluster warhead, containing fifty submunitions, each of which has the effect of a single hand grenade in terms of explosive and lethal impact.

The flight characteristics of the Tochka-U result in a debris pattern which has the cluster munitions impacting on the ground first, followed by the depleted booster, which hits the earth some distance behind the impact of the warhead. This creates a tell-tale signature, so to speak, of the direction from where the missile was launched, which can be crudely calculated by shooting a reverse azimuth from the point of impact of the warhead through the booster.

It is this physical reality which provides the first real clue as to who fired the Tochka-U that hit Kramatorsk. The relationship of the booster when it came to earth, when assessed to the impact zone of the cluster munitions, provides a reverse azimuth which, even when factoring in a generous margin of error for potential drift, points to territory that was under the excusive control of the Ukrainian government, which means that there is little doubt that the missile that struck the Kramatorsk train station was fired by a launcher under the operational control of the 19th Missile Brigade, Ukraine’s only Tochka-U-equipped unit. More specifically, a forensic evaluation of the missile debris clearly shows that it was launched by the 19th Ukrainian Missile Brigade, based near Dobropolia, some 45 kilometers from Kramatorsk.

The 19th Missile Brigade is considered a strategic asset, meaning that it responds directly to the orders of the Ukrainian Ground Forces Command. In short, if the missile was, as it appears, fired by the 19th Missile Brigade, it was doing so based on orders given from high up the chain of command. The launch was no accident.

For its part, the Ukrainian government has attempted to flip the script, blaming Russia for an attack using a missile which Russia is on record as having retired from service in 2019. To back up this assertion, the Ukrainian government has noted that Tochka-U launchers were seen participating in joint military training exercises involving Russian and Belarus forces on Belarusian soil in February 2022, on the eve of Russia’s special military operation commencing against Ukraine.

This was according to Ambassador Evgeny Tsimbaliuk, the Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna, while addressing a special meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council about the attack.

The US backed up the Ukrainian allegation, with its Department of Defense announcing during a closed-door briefing to journalists that Russia had at first announced the missile strike against Kramatorsk, only to retract it once the announcement about civilian casualties was made.

The problem with both the Kiev and Washington claims is that neither is backed up by anything that remotely resembles solid evidence. The television images referred-to by the Ukrainians showed Belarusian Tochka-U launchers, not Russian ones, and the “claims” cited by the US referred to the private Telegram accounts of persons having no affiliation with the Russian government or military.

There is no question that both Russia and the US are sitting on de facto proof of where the Tochka missile was fired. The US has deployed in the region a variety of intelligence-collection platforms which would have detected the location of the missile at the time of launch, and would also have tracked the ballistic trajectory of the missile as it flew toward its target. Likewise, Russia has deployed numerous advanced surface-to-air missile defense systems, including the advanced S-400, which would have tracked the flight of the missile from launch to impact.

The fact that the US has not declassified this data to replicate a Cuban missile crisis-like moment at the UN to demonstrate to the world the scope and scale of a Russan lie strongly suggests that the Russians are not, in fact, lying. Moreover, Russia’s failure to do the same to reinforce its contention that Ukraine fired the missile points to the reality that any Russian radar is operating as part of an active military action zone, and as such Russia would be loath to publish data that could provide Ukraine with a tactical edge on the battlefield.

There is, however, one piece of evidence which proves without a doubt who owned the Tochka-U missile in question that was fired on Kramatorsk, the release of which would not compromise the security interests of the providing nation. Painted onto the booster of the missile, in black, is a unique serial number assigned to the Tochka-U at the time of production (in the Cyrillic alphabet, Ш91579, or Sh91579 in the Latin alphabet.) This serial number was assigned to it at the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant and represents the unique identifying mark for the missile that follows it through its military life cycle.

The use of the production serial number as a unique identifier has been used by the United Nations in Iraq as part of a series of intrusive forensic investigations into the accounting of Iraq’s SCUD missile inventory. The UN used these numbers to track the arrival of Soviet-made SCUD missiles into Iraq, and to account for their final disposition, whether it be through unilateral destruction at the hands of the Iraqis, during training, during maintenance, or during combat operations. The procedures used by the Iraqis for tracking and accounting for its SCUD missiles was derived from official Soviet procedures for the same, and therefore mirror those used by the Ukrainian government.

The serial number of the Tochka-U shows that it was produced in 1991, during the time of Soviet authority. At that time, when a Tochka-U was fully assembled at the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant, it belonged to the Ministry of Defense Industry. The missile would be shipped by rail from the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant to a receiving point, where the Soviet military would take possession of the missile and formally absorb it into its inventory. Each missile is accompanied by a document known as a “passport,” which records every transaction associated with the missile in question. The missile would either be assigned to an operational unit or to a storage unit–again, details that would be recorded in the missile passport.

Each missile had a life span of ten years, after which the manufacturer’s warranty, so to speak, was no longer valid. That meant that a missile produced in 1991 would, under normal circumstances, be retired by 2001. However, the Russian military has often extended the operational lifetime of missiles such as the Tochka-U by implementing inspection procedures designed to extend the lifecycle of the missile. Each such inspection would be recorded in the passport, as would all operational deployments or field exercises where the missile was subjected to handling and movement.

Before a missile is fired, it is formally removed from the owning unit’s inventory, and orders are issued authorizing its use by the Ukrainian General Staff which include the serial number in question. When the missile is launched, the missile passport is closed out, and included with the other paperwork associated with the expenditure of the missile. The missile serial number is recorded at each step.

The Russian military should have in its archives documentation which lists the Tochka-U missiles officially turned over to Ukraine when the Soviet Union collapsed. Likewise, the Ukrainian military should have documents which record the missiles being absorbed into the Ukrainian armed forces. In either case, there exists undisputed records of ownership. Russia could end the discussion of who owned the missile in question simply by providing document-based evidence proving missile ownership (i.e., the transfer of ownership from the Soviet Union to Ukraine.) Likewise, Ukraine could do the same simply by providing a copy of the documentation surrounding its receipt of all Tochka-U missiles from Soviet authority, thereby enabling–if the Ukrainian version is to be believed–that it never possessed the missile in question.

Ukraine’s embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky has declared that the missile strike on Kramatorsk “must be one of the charges at the tribunal” he envisages at the International Criminal Court. “Like the massacre in Bucha, like many other Russian war crimes.”

Zelensky might want to be careful about what he wishes for. Any serious investigation into the Kramatorsk train station bombing will include an inquiry into the missile involved, and questions of ownership in which the missile serial number inscribed on the booster will play a leading role. If this is indeed the case–and the available evidence strongly suggests that it is–then it will be Zelensky and his leadership on the docket for the crime of slaughtering the very civilians whose lives he claims to be protecting.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

April 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Thinking Harder About False Flags and Other Fables

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 19, 2022

The White House plan to destroy Russia by calling President Vladimir Putin names proceeds apace. Apparently, the man whom President Joe Biden has called a “thug,” “killer,” and “war criminal” is now also charged with carrying out a “genocide” and, according to CIA Director William Burns, he may in “despair” over his apparently stalled invasion, be contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Meanwhile over at the Pentagon, positively aglow with the largest “defense” budget since Vietnam, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley is advising that the war started in Ukraine will require building still more US military bases in Europe to confront Putin.

It is unclear who exactly in the band of rogues surrounding Biden is most responsible for the rhetorical flourishes and hyperbole, though one might assume that it is in a fact a group effort by a chorus of mental midgets, most of whom were inherited from the beatified Barack Obama’s Administration. Only Hillary is missing. But at the same time, one must wonder how if all the sobriquets inevitably fail to bring down Putin what plan B might be. After all, as Russia is a significant country possessing a ballistic and submarine launched nuclear missile capability that could destroy the United States, there will have to be some way to dialogue with the Kremlin after the Ukraine fiasco has ended. Calling foreign heads of state criminals and mass murderers is not the best way to restore a satisfactory level of mutual respect that will permit discussion regarding issues of mutual concern, like war and peace.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is being heavily coached by neocon handlers to push the right buttons to appeal to international sentiment in favor of his country. He has been very successful at being alarming about the Russian threat coupled with his demands for more and better weapons. Two expressions that have come to the surface recently to further blacken Vladimir Putin have centered around the concern that the Russians will employ what is referred to as a false flag deception or use chemical weapons in such a fashion, possibly against themselves, so as to justify broadening their invasion. Indeed, the two can be used together. A false flag essentially involves an assailant or a contact pretending to represent something apart from their or his/her genuine identify in an attempt to deceive the targeted individual. False flags are used extensively in intelligence operations and also in military operations where an attempt is being made to hide the true attribution of an act of war.

In my own experience as a CIA operations officer, I once “developed” a relationship with a Libyan intelligence officer using the false identity of an Italian businessman. The Libyan was amenable to an information sharing relationship with an Italian to line his own pockets, but would have balked at the treasonous implications of having a connection with an American. Libya was, not so long ago, a colony of Italy and my contact spoke decent Italian. That was a classic false flag operation conducted to carry out espionage against a foreign target.

A more recent instance of what might be regarded as a false flag with much more lethal consequences was when President Donald Trump attacked a Syrian airbase with 59 cruise missiles in the wake of an almost certainly fabricated report that President Bashar al-Assad’s army had used chemical weapons in an attack on Khan Shaykhun in 2017. Independent investigators subsequently determined that the anti-regime terrorists who were occupying the city at the time had themselves staged the attack and deliberately set it up and blamed it on the Syrian government to produce an expected US response, which was forthcoming as Trump responded to the news headlines and did not bother to order anyone to check the reliability of his intelligence sources before ordering “bombs away.” Fortunately, the evidence that it had likely been a false flag carried out by allies of Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) soon surfaced and there were no additional American attacks.

The latest recriminations hurled at Putin have included his alleged massacre of possibly hundreds of civilians at Bucha as well as the killing of over 50 civilians at the Kramatorsk Train station on April 8th, which almost immediately raised suspicion about a possible false flag. Starting with motive, it made no sense for Russia to either massacre civilians or attack a non-military target like a transportation hub, which would produce a large number of casualties, as it would give NATO and the US a wedge issue to increase pressure on Russia and its soldiers while also turning world opinion against Moscow. In that sense, both the claimed massacre and the attack succeeded as they were both immediately linked to Russia by hostile media.

But that is where the stories began to unravel. Russian soldiers left the town of Bucha on March 30th. Two days later, Bucha was occupied by the Ukrainian Azov Brigade with the objective of finding and removing ‘traitors’. The Azov Brigade has been plausibly described as extremely nationalist and even as neo-Nazi. On April 2/3 the first video was published that showed freshly killed men laying on the streets of Bucha, several of them displaying white arm bands that were presumably used for signaling to departing Russian forces that they were “friendlies.” The “west” and Ukrainian officials immediately called those dead the result of “Russian atrocities.”

Azov has reportedly shot men “fleeing” the combat zones as “traitors” and pledged no surrender to or collaboration with the Russians. It has credibly been responsible for atrocities committed against Russian ethnic Ukrainian citizens in the past. Going back to motive, it was definitely in the Ukrainian interest to kill a couple hundred of its own civilians to further demonize Putin and bring about a western direct military intervention, which is what Zelensky and his neocon advisers have been attempting to do. So, was it a false flag attack in which Ukrainian soldiers deliberately killed Ukrainian citizens so the deaths could be blamed on Russia?

And it also turned out that the missile used in the Kramatorsk Train station attack was of a type found in the Ukrainian arsenal, not that of Russia. A video report by Italy’s LA7 video channel was made by one of their teams inside Ukraine. They were one of first Western news teams to arrive at the alleged bombing site in Kramatorsk. At the time of the attack, numerous Ukrainian citizens were evacuating the city due to its proximity to fighting with Russian forces. Kramatorsk is the temporary seat of the administration of the Donetsk region because the city of Donetsk is in the hands of Russian affiliated Donbass militias and is not under the control of the Kiev based Ukrainian authorities.

The Italian film clip shows close-ups of the remains of the projectile that hit the building, which reveals that the serial number is that of the Tochka-U vehicle launched ballistic missile, which Kiev claimed was Russian, is actually far more plausibly Ukrainian. The clearly visible missile’s serial number appears as (Φ91579), and a comparison, admittedly made by Russian analysts, indicates that the missile belongs to the same series of weapons that have been fired against targets in the regions in the Donbass that are seeking union with Russia. They have been used against “Khartszsk in 04.09.2014 (rocket number ‘Φ15622’) and Tshevsky in 02.02.2015 (Rocket No. ‘Φ91565’), Lugvinova in 13.02.2015 (Missiles No. ‘Φ91566, Φ915527, Φ915328’), Perdiansk in 19.03.2022 (rocket no. ‘Φ915611’), and Militobol on 17.03.2022 (rocket no. ‘Φ915516’).” Furthermore, the missile in question is, according to the Kremlin, still in the Ukrainian arms inventory but considered obsolete by the Russian military.

But let’s think this through a little deeper. If the Russians truly want to blame the Ukrainians for killing other Ukrainians what better way to do it than to fake a missile launch using ordnance that is in operational use with the Ukrainian Army? There exist what are claimed to be eyewitness accounts of Russian troops using the Tochka inside Ukraine, though they come through Ukrainian controlled sources, but the Kremlin very likely has some Tochkas sitting around in various arsenals even if they are no longer suitable for front line use. And the serial numbers, which are painted on or appear on attached labels, can be changed.

The fundamental problem is not the possible use of a false flag in what is already a war between two neighboring states. It should be expected, when convenient for either side. The complication is that actually authenticable information about what is taking place is rare and the two sides are both lying and spinning like crazy to convince an international audience as well as their own citizenry of a “truth” which is actually often closer to fiction. As has long been recognized, the first victim of a war is the truth.

So forget about false flags and other tactical contrivances as well as the lies coming out of Washington and Western Europe. The sad part is that the focus on possible atrocities has reversed what the United States and the west should be doing, i.e. creating an environment where there can be a ceasefire leading to genuine negotiations that can bring about a status quo acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine. Instead, Washington and its allies seem intent on funneling ever more weapons into Ukraine based on a steady stream of questionable accounts of Russian war crimes, a guarantee that the fighting will go on for many more months, if not longer.

Witness for example the line being promoted by the notorious retired US Army Colonel Alexander Vindman, formerly of the US National Security Council but Ukrainian-Jewish born and an enthusiastic advocate of war with Russia. He argues based on the claimed Russian crimes that “Despite what people like Tucker Carlson tell you, there are not two sides to the story of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It IS a story of good and evil. All you have to do is look at the massacre of civilians in Bucha, the missile strike on Kramatorsk railway station, or the countless other atrocities being committed by Russian forces across Ukraine to see it clearly.”

Vindman’s thinking comes out of the neocon playbook of a proper role of the United States as the rule maker for the entire world without any accountability for its own action. He can easily be dismissed as little more than a partisan prepared to go with any half-truth as long as it denigrates Russia. Whatever one feels about “gallant little Ukraine” versus the Russian bear, this kind of advocacy by someone wrapping himself in the Ukrainian flag provides no real rationale for the United States to get involved in a war in which it has no real interest and which will almost certainly turn out badly for all involved. Unfortunately, Vindman is not the only public figure who suffers from precisely the same tunnel vision.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

April 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Russia’s Ukraine operation has no deadline

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | APRIL 13, 2022

In his first extended remarks in nearly a month about the conflict in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that peace talks had reached a “dead end” and pledged that Russia’s “military operation will continue until its full completion.”

Putin defined a more limited aim for the war, focusing on control of the Donbass — and not all of Ukraine. Putin reiterated that Russia’s actions so far in several regions of Ukraine were intended only to tie down enemy forces and carry out missile strikes with the purpose of destroying the Ukrainian military’s infrastructure, so as to “create conditions for more active operations on the territory of Donbass.”

In his words, “Our goal is to provide aid to the people of Donbass, who feel an unbreakable bond with Russia and have been the subjects of genocide for eight years.”

Asked why the operation cannot be speeded up, Putin told reporters: “I often get these questions, ‘can’t we hurry it up?’ We can. But it depends on the intensity of hostilities and, any way you put it, the intensity of hostilities is directly related to casualties.”

He made it clear that “our task is to achieve the set goals while minimising these losses. We will act rhythmically, calmly, and according to the plan that was initially proposed by the General Staff.” He added, “The operation is going according to plan.”

Clearly, Mariupol port city in the south of Donbass could have been conquered with brute force. But that would have caused horrific casualties. Instead, the enemy forces — Ukrainian military, neo-Nazi Azov battalion and foreign mercenaries — have been steadily cornered and entrapped in two main locations, namely, Azovstal steel mills and the city’s main port.

The Russian forces have gained control of the port, while in Azovstal, about 3000-strong enemy forces have been surrounded, who include possibly dozens or hundreds of military officers from the NATO countries — and, surprisingly, Sweden. The experts estimate that the fall of the city into Russian hands is imminent. The Russian Ministry of Defence announced on Wednesday that over 1,000 Ukrainian troops, including 162 officers, surrendered earlier in the day in Mariupol.

In retrospect, the main purpose behind the frantic diplomatic efforts by some of the NATO countries (France and Germany, in particular) to sponsor “humanitarian corridors” out of Mariupol had a nefarious agenda to exfiltrate the Western officers trapped in the city. The heart of the matter is, NATO forces are de facto deployed in Ukraine, as foreign volunteers or as military instructors, and, equipped with heavy military equipment, they are fighting the Russian Army.

A French journalist who managed to sneak in with French “volunteers” has since come out with a video showing that American military personnel coordinate the foreign military in Ukraine and are directly handling the training and enrolment of the foreign “volunteers” in the Ukrainian forces.

In such conditions, quite obviously, peace talks between Moscow and Kiev cannot progress. The big question is: Does the Biden administration want the conflict to end and a peace agreement to be negotiated? The answer seems ‘no’. In fact, the US is fuelling this conflict.

The US Senate has approved a draft law on lend-lease, which will greatly simplify supplies to Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal reported that the US will provide Ukraine with heavy equipment, including Soviet air defence systems. The Biden administration is said to be preparing to announce more than $700 million in additional military assistance to Ukraine, which is likely to include heavy ground artillery systems, helicopters and armoured vehicles. The US had provided more than $2.4 billion in military assistance to Ukraine during Biden’s presidency, including $1.7 billion since Russia began its special operation in Ukraine in late February.

Interestingly, Putin confirmed yesterday the reports that British intelligence had stage-managed the so-called Bucha killings to pillory Russian military and create an international ruckus. The Pentagon had ostentatiously distanced itself from the controversy riveted on what turned out to be fake news. Putin said:

“There is a lot of commotion, but they (EU and US) just needed to adopt a new package of sanctions, as we know very well. Today, we discussed their special operation, the psychological operation carried out by the British.

“If you want to know the addresses, the secret meeting places, the licence plate numbers, the brands of vehicles they used in Bucha, and how they did it, the FSB of Russia can provide this information. If not, we can help. We exposed that ugly, disgusting position of the West together with our Russian friends, in full and from the beginning to the end.”

The Russian and Ukrainian forces have been regrouping and strengthening their positions in Eastern Ukraine through the past fortnight in preparation for a decisive battle for the Donbass. The Russian forces are preparing to encircle a huge concentration of Ukrainian troops, estimated to be in the region of 100,000 servicemen drawn from the best units of the armed forces. Kiev is also transferring all available forces to the eastern front in order to stop the Russian offensive.

Putin’s remarks yesterday suggest that Russia is not looking for a quick victory at any cost. Putin said on Tuesday that Moscow “had no other choice” and that the operation aimed to protect people in parts of eastern Ukraine and to “ensure Russia’s own security”. He vowed it would “continue until its full completion and the fulfilment of the tasks that have been set.”

To be sure, fighting in eastern Ukraine will intensify over the next two to three weeks but the final outcome will take time. The Ukrainian forces and the foreign fighters who have flocked to the eastern region are well-equipped and will not only put up stiff resistance but may even carry the fight into Russian territory.

This grim scenario is fraught with the real danger that NATO may increasingly be finding itself at war with Russia in Ukraine. According to Western media reports, elite British and US special forces units are deployed in Ukraine, including servicemen of the British Special Air Service (SAS) and soldiers of the First Operational Unit of Special Forces “Delta” of the US Army.

There have been reports that the operations in Mariupol were under the command of an American general who attempted to escape by helicopter sent to rescue him a week ago, but was intercepted by the Donetsk militia involved in the operation alongside the Russian forces, and was taken into their custody. It is entirely conceivable that the Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s Moscow mission on Monday and his “very direct, open and tough” talks with Putin at a one-to-one meeting at the latter’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence near Moscow was in coordination with Washington. There has been no readout of the 75-minute meeting from the Kremlin.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Rallying Round the False Flags

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 12, 2022

Another day, another provocation, and Western leaders are frothing at the mouth with denunciations of Russian “barbarity”. U.S. President Joe Biden signs off on more weapons to Ukraine while European counterparts slap more economic warfare sanctions on Russia.

Just when the Western media had saturated “reports” of Russian troops executing civilians and leaving their bodies to rot on the streets of Bucha, then we read of more horror from accusations that Russian forces fired a missile at a train station in Kramatorsk killing over 50 people, including women and children.

Last week the Western media were telling us about Russian forces bombing a theatre in Mariupol and killing people sheltering in the basement. The week before it was an alleged Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in the same city.

The onslaught of the reports of these alleged atrocities is itself telling. There is hardly any time for the Western public to think critically about the reports and whether they are credible. We are being bombarded with sensation and disgust and forced to rally around the flag of supposed Western values such as democracy and morality. That means sending more weapons to Ukraine to “defend” that country from Russian “barbarity”.

Let’s take the latest incident in Kramatorsk on April 8. The New York Times and other Western media reported that a Russian missile hit a train station and killed at least 50 people who were trying to evacuate the city. The impression conveyed in the reporting is that civilians are fleeing as Russian troops advance on more of the Donbass territory.

Russia denied that its forces fired on Kramatorsk. It described the incident as a provocation, or what others would call a false flag operation. The Russians said the missile was fired by the NATO-backed Ukrainian military some 45 kilometres from Kramatorsk.

So, who’s right?

One important fact that all media reported, including the New York Times, is that the explosion was caused by a Tockha-U short-range ballistic missile. Fragments of the munition were identified and photographed near the scene of carnage at the train station.

The Soviet-era weapon is no longer used by the Russian military as of 2019. It is, however, widely used by the Ukrainian military.

Indeed, the Ukrainian military has been firing Tockha-U missiles into the pro-Russian Donbass territory for years, killing civilians indiscriminately. Last month, a missile killed over 20 people when it struck Donetsk city.

Western media have not been reporting that. They have hardly reported that the NATO-backed Kiev Ukrainian forces have been waging a war on the pro-Russian people of Donbass for eight years since the CIA-sponsored coup in Kiev in 2014. The Western media don’t tell you that the NATO bloc has been weaponizing and training Ukrainian regiments like the Azov Battalion that are infested with Nazi supporters who view the killing of Russians as a noble mission. The Western media don’t tell you why Russia views Ukraine and its NATO ambitions as a national security threat and that Moscow went into Ukraine on February 24 because of mounting attacks on civilians in the Donbass.

The Kramatorsk “crime against humanity” that Biden, Johnson, Macron and Von Der Leyen have been denouncing as “cynical” and “abominable” was in all probability carried out by the Ukrainian military that the United States, NATO and the European Union are supporting and sending weapons to.

The same goes for the reported killings in Bucha. Western media and leaders have roundly condemned Russia for allegedly carrying out the atrocity. The Western media have relied totally on Ukrainian claims concerning Bucha, as they have for Kramatorsk and other alleged atrocities.

But if you can withstand the hype and hyperbole, the shock and awe of the media blitz, the claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. The alleged Bucha atrocity came to light in Western media four days after Russian troops withdrew from that city on March 30, and the freshly dead corpses on the streets were filmed by the Ukrainian military. The alleged Russian atrocity has been convincingly debunked, just as Moscow has been saying, blaming it on a provocation.

The earlier bombing of the maternity hospital and the theater in Mariupol were also false-flag attacks carried out by the NATO-backed Ukrainian military. So too was the alleged killing of dozens of Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island. Remember how Western media reported Ukrainian defenders on the island radioing the Russian forces to “go fuck themselves” before they were blasted to death. Turns out the Russians safely evacuated the surrendering Ukrainians under normal laws of war having afforded them safe passage from the island.

The Western media are playing the public like an organ-grinder. The U.S. media have even admitted to spinning false information in the cause of an “information war” against Russia.

And so we see people like Pope Francis kissing the flag and praying for Ukraine and condemning Russia, we see Biden and European leaders calling for war crimes prosecution of Russian President Vladimir Putin and ordering up more weapons to Ukraine. We see American actors like Sean Penn going into hysterics threatening to “melt down” his Academy Awards in protest over Russian barbarity. Maybe Sean’s next project will be starring in a movie about fighting to the death to defend Snake Island!

Ukrainian comedian-actor-president Vladimir Zelensky (a Jewish frontman for a Nazi regime) said of the Kramatorsk atrocity – and it was an atrocity, but one carried out by his military: “Lacking the strength and the courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they [Russia] are cynically destroying the civilian population. This evil knows no limits. And if it is not punished it will never stop.”

Cue the anguished tears, condemnations, and billions of dollars/euros of taxpayer-funded aid and lethal weapons to the Ukrainian regime – because we are all supposed to rally around the flag of Western democratic and moral virtue. Even that latter claim is one big false flag.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Ukraine to use POWs for false flag op – Russia

Samizdat | April 9, 2022

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed on Saturday that Ukraine will use the bodies of captured Russian soldiers to manipulate Western reporters in Irpin, a town near Kiev. Ukraine previously accused Moscow of killing hundreds of civilians in the area around the capital, which Russia denies.

Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said Kiev is “preparing another provocation with the goal of accusing Russia of mass killings of civilians.”

Konashenkov claimed that Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) officials are planning to take the bodies of people who “died from Ukrainian artillery” from a morgue to the basement of one of the buildings on the eastern outskirts of Irpin.

“The SBU will then stage the ‘neutralization’ of a ‘Russian reconnaissance unit’ at the Pushcha-Vodytsia forest, which will [according to Kiev] arrive in Irpin to ‘kill the witnesses of Russia’s war crimes.’”

The spokesman claimed that the Ukrainian forces will present the “bodies of captured Russian soldiers, who had been tortured and killed by nationalists” as “evidence” to the Western media.

Ukraine earlier accused Russian troops of killing more than 400 civilians in Bucha, also near the capital. EU officials and foreign reporters were shown what Kiev said were mass graves and bodies of people shot execution style. Moscow has denied any involvement in the deaths, insisting that the killings happened after its forces retreated from the area late last month.

Earlier, Moscow launched an investigation after several videos which emerged online, purportedly showing Ukrainian fighters torturing and executing Russian soldiers. Kiev claimed the videos were staged and said that its soldiers do not violate the rules of war.

April 9, 2022 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | | Leave a comment

Russia comments on details of deadly missile strike in Kramatorsk

Samizdat | April 8, 2022

The Tochka U ballistic missile, which reportedly killed dozens of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Friday, came from a town under the control of Ukrainian forces, the Russian Defense Ministry claims.

The missile came from the town of Dobropole, around 45km southwest of the city, Moscow stated.

The deadly strike hit the main train station in Kramatorsk when an estimated 4,000 people were waiting for evacuation trains there. The latest casualty count by the city administration said 39 people were killed in the incident and 87 were injured.

Kramatorsk is a city in the northern part of the Donetsk region, and is claimed by the Donetsk People’s Republic as part of its territory. When hostilities broke out in eastern Ukraine in the wake of the 2014 Maidan coup, the city remained under Kiev’s control.

Kiev accused Russia of hitting the station, claiming civilians were targeted deliberately with the intent to kill. President Volodymyr Zelensky said it serves as the latest example that Russia is “evil that knows no boundaries.”

Initial claims from Ukrainian officials said an Iskander missile was used, but images of a Tochka U tail part taken at the scene later flooded social media. Kramatorsk Mayor Aleksandr Goncharenko said missile debris was found 40 meters from where most of the damage was done.

The Russian Defense Ministry denied any responsibility for the attack. It said that Ukrainian troops must have targeted the station to disrupt the evacuation and keep civilians in the city so that they could be used as human shields during an upcoming fight for it.

The ministry claimed that Kiev is the only party in the Ukraine conflict that uses outdated Soviet-made Tochka U missiles. It said that pro-Ukraine accounts on social media claim that Russia has them as well, but the images presented as evidence were taken in Belarus, which does have some Tochka U systems in its arsenal.

April 8, 2022 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | | Leave a comment

MSM’s Bucha Tall Tale

BY NICK GRIFFIN | SAMIZDAT | APRIL 5, 2022

“The Bucha Massacre” has now become the driving force for the propaganda push for even more NATO involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.

Yet the claim that this is a Russian war crime is so patently false that a rational observer can only be left astounded by the combination of bare-faced nerve and slapdash incompetence displayed by the media outlets and politicians pushing this disgusting smear.

The latest effort of the Western media to deny Russian rebuttals is the claim that satellite photos show the bodies were there for weeks. Far from ‘proving’ the case against Russian troops, however, this new assertion in fact raises yet more questions which undermine the Western story.

The satellite photos certainly appear to show bodies, but they also show no sign at all of the burnt out cars which are such a prominent feature of the ground photos and videos. Are we supposed to believe that these vehicles were carefully driven in and positioned between the corpses after the shooting spree?

A similar suspension of belief is required when considering the dates involved. The ‘Bucha Massacre’ entry in Wiki (accessed 09.25 on 5th April 2022) reads as follows:

‘On 4 April, satellite images were provided to The New York Times by Maxar Technologies. The Times compared images to video evidence and concluded: “many of the civilians were killed more than three weeks ago, when Russia’s military was in control of the town.” The images of Yablonska Street show at least 11 “dark objects of similar size to a human body” appearing between 9 March and 11 March”.’

Wiki also tells us that Ukrainian troops re-entered Bucha on April 1st, following the redeployment of the Russian force to south eastern Ukraine.

Maxar Technologies, as a major contractor for NASA, is of course an integral part of the NATO military-industrial complex. As such its assertions with regards to the conduct of the conflict in Ukraine have to be regarded with caution. That said, Maxar’s dates of 9th– 11th March seem to be causing some concern in mainstream media outlets promoting the Russian massacre claim.

The Maxar dates should indeed raise eyebrows. The idea that bodies could lie in the open air for three whole weeks without undergoing massive decay is only remotely credible because the average Westerner thinks that Ukraine is in some kind of winter weather deep-freeze in late March.

Yet a look at the weather data for Kiev for March 2022 reveals that there has not been one single day in the city (of which Bucha is a suburb) with temperatures below freezing since March 11th. The average daily temperature in the last few days of the month was 6 degrees centigrade – the same as the English city of Leeds. That average in turn of course includes highs in the spring sunshine. The weather graph for Kiev for the last week in March shows the situation very clearly, with temperatures up to 15 and 17 degrees:

March weather in Kiev

Anyone who has walked past an animal killed and left on the road for a few days under such conditions will be able to imagine the appalling stench which would come from so many human bodies left in the spring sunshine for three weeks, yet not one of the Ukrainian soldiers or police shown examine the bodies can be seen wearing a mask, making any expression of revulsion or mentioning the smell.

As more graphic images have emerged of the victims, the evident freshness of the corpses seems to have prompted a revision of the dates of the alleged ‘Russian massacre’. By 5th April, for example, the UK Daily Mail’s lead story was claiming that the satellite photos showing the bodies on the road were taken on 19th March. No explanation was given for the ten-day change.

But even accepting the revised time-line, there is still the problem that none of the bodies shown in videos or photos has any sign of decay or damage from carrion-eaters. In order to believe the accounts and videos put out by Kiev and the Western media, it is also necessary to believe that Ukraine has no stray dogs, no rats and not one single crow or other carnivorous bird.

Look again at the video footage of the Ukrainian troops driving along the corpse-lined road. Do you see any carrion-eating birds flying up from any of the bodies?

For that matter, why were some of the bodies not crushed by the Russian tanks which withdrew from and through the town? Do you really believe that soldiers brutal enough to slaughter dozens of defenceless civilians would then be considerate enough to slow down their withdrawal from the area by carefully weaving their heavy armour around each corpse?

Returning to the weather, there was of course rain during the three weeks the bodies are supposed to have laid (not) rotting in the road. Looking at the cardboard of the green boxes of the food aid packages lying near some of the (clearly fresh) corpses, it is clear that they have not been subjected to bad weather. The presence of those packages is also, of course, another important pointer as to the truth in this matter – for they are Russian.

Thus, in order to believe the Western propaganda narrative, we must swallow yet another ridiculous tall tale: The ‘analysts’ have spent the last month repeatedly telling us that the Russian army cannot even supply its own troops with fuel or food; but now they would have us believe that the Russians went to all the trouble of taking vast quantities of emergency food parcels to the occupied suburbs of Kiev, handed them out to civilians – and then promptly shot them.

On top of all this, there are four key facts which have already received considerable attention on Telegram (the last uncensored social media platform of any size in the West), though which have predictably enough been routinely ignored by the warmongering mainstream media.

The first of these is the video of the Mayor of Bucha speaking about how the Russian troops have left and that a ‘clean-up’ is now underway. As a non-Russian speaker I cannot judge for myself, but the comments by Russian-speakers accompanying this video on Telegram say that he does not mention the bodies of civilians.

The second fact, closely related to this, is the video which shows a detachment of the paramilitary Ukrainian National Police clearing the roads of burnt out and abandoned vehicles. Again, there is no sign of the bodies which appeared on the streets the following day.

Third, and perhaps most devastating of all, are the white armbands on a number of the bodies. These are clearly shown in the main video of Ukrainian troops driving along the corpse-strewn road, and they are also visible on several of the bodies of victims of torture and murder in cellars in Bucha.

The fact that Ukrainian forces wear blue armbands, while Russian troops wear white ones, is universally accepted. A number of videos from various parts of the conflict zone also show civilians wearing white armbands, as a sign either of sympathy with the Russians or at least neutrality.

Situation in Ukraine
Video: Kiev Territorial Defence in Bucha Given Green Light to Shoot Those Not Wearing Blue Armband 3 April, 16:38 GMT

Thus the appearance of white armbands on the victims of ‘the Bucha Massacre’ is overwhelming evidence that the victims were ethnic Russians. They were murdered not by Russian troops – who were of course sent in with a key aim of stopping the persecution of Russian-speakers by racist neo-Nazis – but by Ukrainians.

This should come as no surprise, for the whole history of Ukrainian nationalism is based on the mass murder of ‘unclean’ and ‘sub-human’ civilians from other ethnic groups, most notably the Poles of Wolyn and Eastern Galicia, Jews, Hungarians, Romanians and, of course, Russians.

Finally, we come to the video clip from the streets of Bucha, which was posted and then removed from the social media account of the known Ukrainian neo-Nazi ‘Botman’: “There are guys without blue armbands. Can we shoot them?” “F**k, yeah!”

The truth of the massacre is so clear that we can see why Western leaders such as Boris Johnson are so adamant that there should not be a proper international investigation into the crime.

Instead, they are using the most blatant fake news to justify imposing another round of sanctions pain on their own people, and to excuse the sending of billions of pounds, dollars and euros worth of high-tech weapons in order to prolong the war. One has to wonder about the scale of the kick-backs these real war criminals are getting from their military-industrial complex cronies!

April 7, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Bucha, Budapest and the Multiplying Problems of Real War Criminals

By Tom Luongo | Gold Goats N’ Guns | April 5, 2022

Fungal President Joe Biden openly declared Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” in a recent outburst while speaking at NATO. He’s repeated this in the wake of the initial images coming out of the town of Bucha, Ukraine where an alleged massacre of civilians by Russian soldiers took place.

Like many incidents similar to this in the past it is hard to take any of these claims of blame seriously. The US and UK have staged many a ‘false flag’ operation in the past at convenient times to gin up diplomatic outrage to advance a particular political agenda.

That agenda is always to justify more war to deal with the villain du jour. Today it’s Putin. In the past it’s been Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic or Bashar al-Assad. The playbook is always the same. Shocking images and film of honest-to-god atrocities against civilians and an endless back and forth of accusations and suppression of real information about the event.

Sadly, that becomes the focus not the fact that civilians were murdered for political gains.

Bucha seems to fit this pattern quite well, if more crudely implemented than events like this in the past.

The censorship is nearly total to support the ‘current thing,’ in this case Bucha. But it is no different than the campaigns against certain medications to fight COVID-19.

When it comes to foreign policy objectives, there is always a common denominator in these events to frame that villain and Putin, in particular, as some evil madman… British intelligence.

From the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, to the downing of MH-17 over Ukraine, to the ammonia gas attack in Douma, at the center of these allegations is always some arm of the Brits.

All the roads to RussiaGate lead through Ukraine and British Intelligence. At some point you just have to face the face of the agitator. Every one of those stories have logical inconsistencies wide enough to drive a column of tanks through.

These are painstakingly worked through by investigative journalists pushed to the fringe by the technocrats’ willing partners in Silicon Valley to minimize their influence over the narrative.

That, in itself, should be considered prima facia evidence of malfeasance but sadly it isn’t.

From the moment Russia’s troops crossed the border into Ukraine on February 24th there has been a clear strategy by the Russian Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs to head off potential false flags publicly before they could be pulled off.

The Russian Foreign Ministry singled out the UK for its histrionics saying if they wanted to lead the charge, they’ll get the worst treatment.

With the pullout of Russian troops from around Kiev however, they have little control over the preparing of the stage. You believe what you want to believe about Bucha, I don’t care.

Given the track record of Russia’s accusers here I’m taking the position that these allegations have to be incontrovertibly proven publicly for me to believe a word of them. Here’s one version of the story (warning: very graphic).

That is how low the credibility of the sources on this are. The UK government has been, along with Biden’s Dept. of State and National Security Council, the most belligerent in their response to Russia’s military operation. Their history and naked hatred of all things Russian stretches back multiple centuries.

In short, they have motive, means and opportunity to stage a false flag to push public sentiment further towards NATO’s intervention into Ukraine officially, therefore a false flag is the most likely scenario.

Complaints about how Russia waged the initial part of this war have centered on their unwillingness (but not opposition) to target civilians. Kiev could have easily been taken if the Russians wanted to commit massive atrocities against civilians.

They did not do so. That flies in the face of what’s being alleged about Bucha. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen the way it is being alleged, but the burden of proof lies with the accuser (Ukraine) and their allies (The US and UK).

And the main amplifier of this story, the UK, blocked not one but two proposals by the Russian Federation to investigate what happened in Bucha. We can’t have that, there’s a war to escalate.

Remember this story is only possible because the Russians first got repulsed from taking Kiev and then pulled back from the areas surrounding it. They are redeploying forces and regrouping for a major push against Ukrainian forces trapped in the eastern part of Ukraine.

That operation will likely wipe out what’s left of the UAF troops there and push the next phase of this war on the ground to its natural state of equilibrium for the next few months.

There are so many people whose crimes in Ukraine would be exposed by a Russian win there that it is truly existential to keep that from happening. It goes deeper than even the ideology of the West which needs to subjugate Russia if the Davos plan for global governance is going to have any hope of succeeding.

This is also personal for everyone from Joe Biden himself to hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the various schemes, plots and crimes committed in the petrie dish of corruption they’ve staged their attacks on common decency from.

So, when I say they have motive, means and opportunity, I mean it. These are the same people who impeached Donald Trump over a phone call. Of course they will say the quiet parts out loud about what they want to do to Putin for screwing up their grand plans.

This brings me back to my article from the other day handicapping the Hungarian elections. Because Hungary is now in a very strong position I posited they’d be in if Viktor Orban won the election, which he did, emphatically. And that means the EU is in a very precarious position to continue supporting an anti-Russia policy stance.

With a fiscally, monetarily (they are not on the euro) and energy independent Hungary there is little argument for them staying in the EU if Brussels is going to treat them as second class members. Orban and his government have been resolute in their refusal to get involved in the Russia/Ukraine conflict even though there has been serious pressure applied by NATO.

In anticipation of any resistance to the EU’s new set of draconian and frankly insane sanctions on Russia the European Commission wasted no time in announcing they are beginning ‘rule of law’ procedures against Hungary to cut them out of any monetary distributions within the bloc.

The European Commission will soon trigger a powerful new mechanism to cut funding to Hungary for eroding the bloc’s rule-of-law standards, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday.

The announcement comes two days after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a fourth consecutive term in an election that international observers said was marred by an uneven playing field benefiting the ruling Fidesz party…

… Von der Leyen said her team informed Hungary of its decision on Tuesday after reviewing Budapest’s responses to an informal letter the Commission sent last November asking for information on its rule-of-law concerns.

“We’ve carefully assessed the result of these questions,” von der Leyen said, speaking to the European Parliament. “Our conclusion is we have to move on [to] the next step.”

There’s nothing ‘careful’ about the EU’s assessment here. Hungary and Poland were forced to accept these new rules in a major political battle with the EU in 2021 over their Green New Deal. He wasn’t in a strong enough position to stop this and it meant then we would wind up here today if he won re-election.

The EC’s formal charges against Hungary over their furry law is just like other such moves, namely against Poland for its hated Supreme Court recall law. They are forcing the ultimate choice on Hungary because all the EU really has is Article 7 censure and expulsion from the Union as a threat.

The amount of money they are holding as a carrot to Orban in COVID relief funds is just 30 pieces of silver and he knows it.

So, if you play this out to the end, this is where Orban has to go. He must force the EU to do what Mark Rutte said last month, kick them out or back down.

Today the European Commission is staring at the real threat: that Hungary has no intention of going along with the new sanctions and Orban actually welcomes Von der Leyen’s move to censure and cut off Hungary’s funds from the EU budget.

They will be a country that now pays in but gets nothing in return other than the stick.

But as long as they are a member of the European Commission they can and will veto anything else Von der Leyen cooks up to punish Russia with as a political cudgel to beat vulnerable EU members into going along with.

The EC thinks they will be making an example of Hungary but what they will really be doing is giving Orban an even stronger hand to play on the European Council. Now he can stay in Budapest and tell Hungarians that the EU no longer works for Hungarians and they would be better off free from their yoke.

Hung-exit, anyone?

Elections have consequences when you don’t control the outcome of them. This is why the neocons and war criminals like Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham and Joe Biden are all screaming that something or someone has to do something to stop Putin whose operation in Ukraine still has the potential to expose everything.

It’s why Bucha was so haphazardly staged and ham-fistedly packaged up to us.

The blow out results in Hungary on Sunday were a major blow to EU confidence and solidarity. Twelve years of calling Orban a Nazi while supporting real 4th generation Nazis in Ukraine landed with a whimper.

Von der Leyen is a certifiable idiot for invoking the ‘rule of law’ weapon against Orban here using the alleged events at Bucha. She’s using it as an excuse to purposefully destroy the European economy per the directive of her Davos handlers. Their calculus is simple, burn the entire global economy down to punish Putin, Xi and everyone else not down with the Comintern.

It exposes the EU’s complicity in the war on Russia as willing partners with the US and UK because if they wanted to continue virtue signaling they would propose crazy new sanctions and let Hungary veto them.

But now we can only conclude this is exactly what they wanted.

That puts things into stark relief as we look ahead to the increasingly likely probability that French President Emmanuel Macron loses to Marine LePen in France who would be in a far stronger position to break up EU solidarity, freezing it politically at a time when Europe’s financial vulnerability has never been higher.

Meanwhile Putin keeps saying “Got Gold or Rubles?” and Orban is preparing a cold dish of political revenge on the nastiest people in Europe. When this mouse roars, they may finally have to listen.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia willing to investigate Bucha’s tragedy

By Lucas Leiroz | April 5, 2022

The alleged massacre of civilians in Bucha is one of the most talked about topics around the world in recent hours. Russia has been repeatedly accused by Western governments and mainstream media, and there are already calls for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be prosecuted for war crimes and human rights violations. However, there is a series of controversies in the case, from possible falsifications in the images released by Ukrainian forces to incoherent information about the dates of the massacre, which demands a deep investigation.

According to the official Kremlin’s position, the Russian government categorically denies any involvement by its forces in operations that killed civilians in Bucha. Spokesperson Dmistry Peskov stated on Monday, April 4, about the case, making it clear that Moscow, in addition to denying participation in the massacre, supports the immediate launch of high-level investigations on the occurrence. The Russian authorities also committed to take the discussion forward to the UN Security Council in order conduct an international investigation in the grave tragedy.

Furthermore, Peskov made it clear that the Russian government does not trust the veracity of all the information contained in the videos and photos of dead civilians released by the Ukrainian government. There are reports from Russian experts pointing out possible forgeries and frauds in the content of the videos. Other Russian officials also commented on the case, pointing out that there is evidence that the videos were forged or performed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, claimed during a meeting with UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths that the Ukrainian press had released fake videos about Russian operations in Bucha, and that there had been a staging organized by Kiev’s forces in the region days after the departure of Russian troops.

In the same vein, the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, said that the videos and photos released by the Ukrainian press and the Western statements about them appear to be a “custom-made story”. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also spoke out, claiming that the case is a production by the Kiev regime for Western media that sounds like a provocation against Russia. Finally, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, also expressed distrust about the veracity of the material released by Kiev and requested a procedural assessment on the possible massacre of civilians.

Despite the distrust, which seems justified in the face of a long history of fake news and information warfare on the part of the NATO-Kiev axis, Moscow seems open to hearing contrary opinions, which is precisely why the government seems so interested in launching an investigation, both using its official experts and international agents convoked by the UNSC. It is possible that, in addition to the obviously fake and staged videos, there is also real material, with actual images of dead people. The Kremlin’s main point is that, regardless of whether the videos and photos are real or not, there is no Russian involvement in cases of massacre of civilians.

Considering the evident victory of the Special Operation in Bucha region, there would be no strategic advantage for the Russian military to shoot civilians, which would cause unnecessary harm to the country. Now, Zelensky, Biden and other Western leaders are calling for Putin to be condemned by international courts and planning an increase in sanctions. So, it does not seem at all reasonable that Russian forces would have deliberately planned and carried out a massacre of civilians, considering that these would be the obvious consequences of such acts.

Another point that needs to be mentioned is that there is an evident time lapse in the case. The Russians withdrew from Bucha on 30 March. The Ukrainians entered Bucha on March 31, and the “retake” of the city was announced by the mayor on the same day. Azov’s paramilitaries entered the city only on April 1. So how were the “bodies in the streets” found only on April 3?

If international society is really interested in the truth, it must heed the Russian request for an investigation at the UNSC. If Western governments refuse to cooperate with the investigation, it will be possible to conclude that they have something to hide. The UN must remain neutral and commit itself to the search for the truth of the facts, even if this truth is unpleasant for the West.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

April 5, 2022 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , , , | Leave a comment

Casualties feared after alleged Ukrainian chemical plant attack

Samizdat | April 5, 2022

Retreating Ukrainian forces have allegedly blown up a tank allegedly containing hydrochloric acid, at a chemical plant in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) town of Rubezhnoe, which has emerged as a flashpoint in the ongoing military conflict.

The tank explosion was aimed at a populated area, controlled by local fighters, the LPR’s militia claimed on Tuesday.

“[These] terrorist actions might lead to mass civilian casualties,” the force warned on its Telegram channel, adding that authorities are currently collecting information about any casualties resulting from the incident.

The LPR has also accused Ukrainian media of “actively spreading fakes” that Donbass fighters had blown up the tank themselves. They said Kiev has been doing this in order to cover up “the criminal terrorist actions” of its own forces.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Kiev-nominated governor of Lugansk, Sergey Gaidai, stated in his Telegram channel that a Russian projectile had hit a nitric acid tank in the area, and called on local residents to stay indoors and close all doors and windows, as well as to prepare wet face masks.

“Nitric acid is dangerous if inhaled or swallowed,” he warned. It is unclear if he was referring to the same incident or to a different one. Ukrainian authorities have not commented on the allegations leveled by the Donbass militias so far. Neither have Russian officials or the country’s military.

The incident occurred on Tuesday at the ‘Zarya’ chemical plant, once one of Ukraine’s leading chemical enterprises. Videos reportedly taken at the scene and published by the RIA news agency show thick, orange-tinged smoke billowing over the area, which has some residential buildings.

The plant has storage facilities for sulfuric and hydrochloric acid. When released into the atmosphere, strong hydrochloric acid might produce a toxic fog affecting people’s eyes and airways. If mixed with various oxidizers like potassium permanganate, it releases highly toxic chlorine gas.

In early March, Moscow warned the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) about potential false-flag attacks staged by the Ukrainian radicals that might involve the use of toxic chemical agents. “Ukrainian radical groups aided by the American security services have developed several potential scenarios of using toxic chemicals to stage various false flag attacks,” Russia’s statement to the OPCW said at that time.

April 5, 2022 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | | Leave a comment

Ukraine stages more ‘killings’ of civilians: Russia

Samizdat | April 5, 2022

Ukrainian security services have staged more ‘killings’ of civilians in several towns and villages to make headlines in the Western media and accuse Moscow of war crimes, Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed on Tuesday.

Moscow insists that the same tactics have been used by Kiev to blame Russian forces for atrocities in the town of Bucha last week.

“The troops of the 72nd Ukrainian Main Center for Psychological Operations conducted another staged filming of civilians allegedly killed by violent actions of the Russian armed forces in order for it to be distributed through the Western media,” the ministry’s spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said during a briefing.

According to “confirmed information,” the filming took place in the village of Moschun some 23km northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kiev on Monday, he stated.

Similar false flag operations have been carried out by the Ukrainian side in the cities of Sumy, Konotop and elsewhere, Konashenkov added.

On Saturday, Ukraine distributed graphic footage of multiple corpses lying in the streets of the suburban town of Bucha northwest of Kiev, saying that they were executed by Russian troops.

Moscow, which insists that it is not targeting civilians during its operation in Ukraine, has rejected those accusations as a provocation and a false flag operation by Kiev.

It pointed out numerous inconsistencies in the Ukrainian story, including the fact that the video emerged several days after the Russian forces withdrew from Bucha, and that the local mayor didn’t mention any killings in his video address declaring the “liberation” of the city.

Despite Russian arguments and Moscow’s attempt to call a UN Security Council session, the West has immediately picked, who to blame for the purported atrocities. US President Joe Biden has demanded a “war crimes trial” for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and the EU promised to send its experts to aid Ukrainian authorities in collecting evidence at the site.

April 5, 2022 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , | Leave a comment

Ukrainian Police Said They Conducted “Clearing Op” in Bucha a Day Before Dead Body Videos Emerged

Narrative fail

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | April 4, 2022

Ukrainian police posted on Facebook that they had conducted a “clearing op” in Bucha the day before videos emerged showing dead bodies scattered around the settlement, as the war of words over the alleged “war crime” continues.

NATO powers and pro-Ukraine commentators have seized upon the alleged atrocity in a bid to escalate the war, with MSNBC hosts and guests even asserting that it justifies directly attacking Russia and putting American boots on the ground in Ukraine.

MSNBC host Ali Velshi demanded “direct military involvement,” something that would almost inevitably kick off World War III, in response to the alleged incident.

Former Army Major John Spencer also appeared on the same show to demand American “boots on the ground” in Ukraine.

Moscow has vehemently denied involvement, claiming Ukraine shelled the city after Russian troops had already withdrawn.

The only evidence offered so far pointing to Russian responsibility is the claims of Ukrainian authorities, with are being breathlessly amplified by the mainstream media without an ounce of skepticism.

Margaret Brennan of CBS admitted that Ukrainian President Zelensky’s team had “handed” her the videos and they were broadcast, as journalist Michael Tracey wrote, with “zero independent corroboration.”

The notion that Ukrainian authorities, who have been caught staging innumerable incidents already in a bid to lobby for more NATO military involvement, would lie about this is seemingly not even a consideration.

A timeline provided from reporting by the New York Times suggests that pro-Ukrainian Azov neo-nazi militants entered Bucha after Russian troops left and after the Mayor of Bucha had announced the town’s liberation with no mention of any atrocities.

One member of Azov was reportedly heard asking if he could shoot individuals who weren’t wearing blue armbands.

Another report asserts that Ukrainian national police posted on Facebook how they had conducted a “clearing operation” in Bucha before the alleged atrocities occurred accompanied by a video of their men walking around the town.

“Today, on 2 April, in the liberated city of Bucha, Kiev region, special units of the Ukrainian National Police began clearing the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops,” the Facebook post said.

As ever, with propaganda on both sides, it is virtually impossible to know what happened in Bucha, but to claim it’s an open and shut case of “war crimes” as the western media proclaims without any independent evidence is clearly ludicrous.

April 4, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

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