Evidence has been uncovered that indicates Russia's campaign of misinformation about its war in Ukraine started before its illegal invasion of the sovereign country on Feb. 24, according to the U.S. Department of State (DOS).
The DOS reports on its website ShareAmerica that the Russian Federation's disinformation efforts include false claims that atrocities committed by Russian military, and documented by satellites, in Bucha, Ukraine are actually staged vignettes produced by the West as provocations.
"The Kremlin has ramped up its disinformation campaign since Russia began its unprovoked war with Ukraine," ShareAmerica states in its April 13 report, "but there were plenty of false claims leading up to it."
The ShareAmerica article reports Russia allegedly staged an attack on Feb. 22 on a highway in the Russian-controlled Dunbas region in Ukraine. In the alleged attack, an improvised explosive device (IED) reportedly destroyed a car and a van and killed three people. Sources in the Kremlin claimed the attack was conducted by Ukrainian forces and the dead were military officials with the Russia-friendly Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine.
However, ShareAmerica reports that the video of the alleged attack was "so suspicious - and so gruesome" that it triggered an investigation by Bellingcat, an investigative-journalism organization based in the Netherlands that specialized in open-source intelligence and fact-checking.
Bellingcat's investigation, which included research and testimony by an explosive-weapons expert and a forensic pathologist, reported numerous suspicious findings. The experts noted neither vehicle had license plates; neither vehicle appeared to move beyond where the IED exploded, indicating neither was moving at the time of the blast; and the damage to the vehicles didn't match that of an actual IED blast, ShareAmerica reports.
“In my opinion, the images do not represent a credible scenario,” Chris Cobb-Smith, an explosive weapons expert and director of Chiron Resources, reported to Bellingcat, according to ShareAmerica. “I believe the incident has been manufactured to give the appearance of an IED blast in which three individuals died.”
Injuries shown on the bodies in the video also raised questions among independent experts studying the video, ShareAmerica reports.
There were clear cuts on both sides of one head that "cleanly" separated the skull cap from the rest of the skull, according to the report; Bellingcat's investigation determined the cuts were the same as those done during an autopsy. Lawrence Owens, an expert at England's University of Winchester, concluded the individuals in the video were dead before they were placed at the accident scene.
Bellingcat’s final report concludes that the incident involved “the staged use of cadavers and likely faked IED damage,” ShareAmerica reports.
"The bottom line: the Kremlin used a fake story about a fake IED that didn’t kill anyone to drum up support back in Russia for a war it provoked," the article states.
