(Washington) The United States on Thursday claimed to have evidence that Moscow is planning to film a fake Ukrainian attack on Russia in order to use it as a pretext to invade Ukraine, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. .
Updated yesterday at 5:34 p.m.
“We believe that Russia could produce a very violent propaganda video, which would show corpses and actors playing the role of mourners, as well as images of destroyed places with Ukrainian or Western military equipment,” said Mr. Kirby during a press briefing.
The United States had previously raised the possibility of Russia carrying out a so-called “false flag” operation, where a country uses enemy recognition marks to confuse. But this is the first time they’ve talked about videos in such detail.
“We have information that the Russians probably want to fabricate a pretext for an invasion, which is very much in line with their ways,” Kirby said.
“One of the options is that the Russian government, we believe, is preparing a fake attack by Ukrainian soldiers or intelligence agents on Russian territory or Russian speakers (from Ukraine),” he added.
This false attack would give Russia, which has massed more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, a pretext to invade the country.
Neither he nor State Department spokesman Ned Price presented evidence for their claims.
“We’ve seen this kind of activity from the Russians in the past and we think it’s important, when we have this kind of information, to make it public,” Kirby noted.
He pointed out that such tactics are generally “approved at the highest levels of the Russian government”.
According to Ned Price, this video “is one of the options that the Russian government is preparing as a pretext to launch and potentially justify a military aggression against Ukraine”.
The United States does not know if Moscow has decided to implement this plan, said the spokesman for American diplomacy.
“Russia has signaled that it wants to continue diplomatic exchanges to achieve de-escalation, but acts like this suggest otherwise,” he noted.
Asked insistently about the lack of evidence to support his statements, Mr. Price explained that his information came from the intelligence services, without further details.
“I’m not going to detail what’s in our possession,” he said. “I defer to your judgement.”
Asked later about the possibility that sending American troops to Eastern Europe would add fuel to the fire, John Kirby assured that Washington wanted to reassure its allies.
“We continue to provide security assistance to Ukraine, so that it can better defend itself against this threat”, while “reassuring our allies to whom we have important security commitments” linked to NATO , he said on the Fox News television channel.
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called the US announcements “clear and shocking evidence of Russia’s unwarranted aggressiveness and (Moscow’s) covert activities to destabilize Ukraine”.
“The only way out for Moscow is de-escalation, withdrawal and commitment to finding a diplomatic path,” she tweeted.