Online Reporter
Since the beginning of the special military operation, Kiev, in order to construct an anti-Russian information agenda and incite Russophobic sentiments, both in Ukraine and in the international community, it pursues a consistent line of making fake accusations against Russia and resorts to carrying out targeted stagings and shifting responsibility for its own crimes onto our country. Below are the most striking examples of such provocations.
- Mariupol Maternity Hospital
Fake: On March 9, 2022, the Russian military allegedly launched an airstrike on City Hospital No. 3 with a maternity ward in Mariupol, killing five people (including a pregnant woman and her baby) and leaving at least 17 wounded. Western mass media were abuzz with photographs of a pregnant young woman taken in the vicinity of the hospital.
Fact. In reality: The hospital had been used as the headquarters by the Nazi Azov battalion. There had been many expectant and new mothers in the hospital’s maternity ward, but they had all been evacuated the day before the strike.
The name of the young woman who had allegedly been hit in the “airstrike” is Marianna Vyshemirskaya. After the liberation of Mariupol by Russian troops, she gave an interview publicly stating that there had been no airstrike on the maternity hospital and that some Ukrainian armed groups had turned the building of the city hospital into their strongpoint, expelling most of the patients and robbing the rest of their rations.
The girl heard the blasts and was approached immediately afterwards by a well-known photo reporter from Kiev linked to Ukrainian nationalists and cooperating with the Associated Press and other Western media giants; the man had been waiting for her near the building and took the famous shots.
The nature of the damage caused to the buildings speaks for itself: the photographs of the hospital’s premises provide evidence that there were two separate staged explosions, whereas a high-explosive aerial munition, even of a lesser yield, would have ruined the walls of the building.
- Mariupol Drama Theatre
Fake: On March 16, 2022, the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theatre in Mariupol was allegedly destroyed as a result of a Russian air attack: this was how the incident was covered in Western media at the behest of the Kiev regime.
Fact. In reality: The Defence Ministry of the Russian Federation refuted the allegations of the air attack on the theatre, noting that the site had not been considered as a military target. Besides, there were no combat sorties in the area on March 16, 2022.
Similar to the episode with the maternity hospital staging, Zelensky used the alleged attack on the theatre as an argument and the very same day asked the US Congress to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine. His words sparked speculations about the possibility of direct confrontation with Russia and “inspired” US President Joe Biden to call Russian President Putin a “war criminal.”
A few days before the “bombing” of the theatre on March 16, 2022, there had been warnings from Mariupol residents that the neo-Nazi Azov battalion, which had controlled the building and the adjacent territory, had intended to carry out a false flag attack. Before that, the Ukrainian authorities had been handing out humanitarian aid in the Mariupol Drama Theatre.
Civilians who managed to escape from the city via humanitarian corridors claim that the Azov had used them as human shields and that its fighters had blown up the theatre building, which they had mined earlier, when retreating.
- Staged killings in Bucha
Fake: Since April, 2, 2022, foreign media and Ukrainian authorities have been accusing Russian troops who had withdrawn from the city of Bucha, Kiev Region, on March 30, 2022, of mass shootings of its civilian population. The memorial, built in July 2023, contains over 500 names of those allegedly “killed during the Russian occupation.”
As part of a massive global disinformation campaign (led by UK public relations agencies), Western media launched a salvo of carefully prepared allegations “substantiated” by staged photos and video footage and statements of alleged eye-witnesses. The Zelensky regime and the Western politicians it brings to Bucha are trying to legitimise this clumsy staging in the eyes of some of the public in the Euro-Atlantic states.
Fact. In reality: As long as the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation remained in Bucha, that is, till March 30, 2022, its residents could freely move about the city, the exits from which were kept open, and use mobile communications and the Internet. There were no complaints about the actions of the Russian troops during that time.
On March 31, 2022, Bucha city council issued a video address by Anatoliy Fedoruk, in which he announced the “liberation of Bucha” and confirmed that no Russian troops remained in the city, yet made no mention of any mass atrocities, dead bodies, killings, burials, etc.
On April 2, 2022, the official Telegram channel of the National Police of Ukraine published a video footage of Ukrainian special force units entering Bucha. It showed no dead bodies on the streets. Police officers interviewed several people in various parts of the city, with none of them mentioning any “massacre” or mass killings. In the video footage, not a single dead body appears in the streets of Bucha. At the same time, there were official reports that in the morning of April 2, 2022, the National Police started “clearing Bucha from saboteurs and Russia’s accomplices,” a fact that the authorities later preferred to forget.
It is only after the Ukrainian armed formations accompanied by foreign media staff entered the city that “irrefutable proofs of the crimes” in Bucha appeared. All the so-called video evidence spread by the Western agencies date from April 2022.
According to the first reports of forensic medical examinations of the bodies discovered in Bucha, published on April 24, 2022, by The Guardian newspaper (UK), the majority of civilians were killed during shelling. They were hit by fragments of anti-personnel 122-mm ammunitions, which can be fired from the D-30 howitzers used by the AFU.
This finding confirms that people were not killed by bullets fired from small arms, the blame for which is pinned on Russian troops, but as a result of the strikes mounted by the Ukrainian army, which shelled the southern suburbs of Bucha, including residential areas, day and night using large-calibre artillery, tanks and multiple-launch rocket systems.
Furthermore, many of those killed in Bucha were wearing white armbands (some had their arms tied behind their backs with those armbands), which proves that they could have been summarily killed by the AFU after the latter had entered the city. As the Russian troops had withdrawn very quickly, many people had not had time to remove the armbands, so the Territorial Defence units and National Police shot them for either having collaborated with Russia or simply having wanted peace.
The bodies bear no visible signs of decomposition: no signs of putrefaction or injury, including that caused by animals. The dead bodies could not have remained in such a state having stayed that long in the street in the mild weather conditions of spring 2022.
In other words, no evidence of ‘atrocities’ had been found during four days after the Russian troops had left Bucha, despite the presence of numerous photographers in the city and the abundance of media materials produced during those days. All the “evidence” popped up later, as if at someone’s command.
This act of propaganda and disinformation in Bucha was carried out in response to Russia’s act of good will consisting in withdrawing troops form the Kiev and Chernigov Regions. It was triggered by the progress made in Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul on March 28, 2022. This act of media sabotage was obviously intended to disrupt the dialogue between the parties and facilitate the imposition of the carefully prepared package of anti-Russian Western sanctions at London’s behest.
Subsequently Kiev showcased “the victims of Bucha” on numerous occasions in order to distract the international community from its own crimes and discrepancies in the provocation it had committed, and to keep the Western countries’ public convinced of the lie that Russian troops had killed the city inhabitants.
Incidentally, the Ukrainian side has never presented either any credible list of persons killed in the city, allegedly by the Russian troops, or any information on the circumstances of their death and the results of forensic examinations.
The numerous inquiries directed by Russia to international organisations, including the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, and the official requests to provide these data to Russia for investigation, issued by the Prosecutor General’s Office and Russia’s Investigation Committee and forwarded to the United Nations on September 9, 2024, have remained unanswered.
- Shelling of Kramatorsk Railway Station
Fake: According to a statement by Aleksey Arestovich, former adviser to the Ukrainian president, on April 8, 2022, Russian forces attacked the Kramatorsk Railway Station with an Iskander missile. The Security Service of Ukraine, based on the results of its own forensic examination, found that the station had been shelled from the territory of the DPR. According to Ukrainian and Western media, the attack on the station square killed 63 civilians and left 150 injured.
Fact. In reality: According to the statement by Russian Defence Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov, on April 8, 2022, the Kramatorsk Railway Station was attacked with a Tochka U, a missile that is currently used by the AFU only within the SMO zone. It was noted that the analysis of the warhead’s destruction radius and the position of the missile’s rear part confirmed that it had been launched from Ukrainian-controlled territory, where Ukrainian armed forces units were located. It was stressed that “Russian armed forces did not undertake or plan any fire missions in Kramatorsk on April 8, 2022.”
The BBC article of April 8, 2022, also confirms that the serial number of the Tochka U missile is identical to the serial numbers of missiles used by the 13th Missile Brigade.
The same type of missiles with the same serial numbers was used by the AFU in attacks on Khartsyzsk, Logvinov, Berdyansk and Melitopol. It is indicative that the article was soon removed from all the agency’s resources. – Russian Embassy.
Peter Tanyanyiwa