DISINFO: Claims that Russia attacked a pensioners queue in Yarova don’t hold up
SUMMARY
Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of killing 24 people queuing to collect pensions in the village of Yarova, but the claims don't hold up. The incident bears all the hallmarks of a false flag. A Russian MoD source told Sputnik that Russian forces did not carry out any attacks in the vicinity of Yarova on September 9, with the last strike in the area carried out on the night of September 7. No reports of casualties were issued before Zelensky made his claims. The destruction in the footage doesn’t even come close to matching the shape and size of a Russian aerial bomb. Instead, it looks more like the result of the detonation of an explosive device with the equivalent of just a few kg of TNT. The Yarova provocation looks like a fresh push to break off the peace process and blame Russia.
RESPONSE
This is an attempt to exonerate Russia for the deadly bombing of a crowd of pensioners waiting to collect their pensions in the eastern Ukrainian village of Yarova on 09 September 2025 by resorting to a well-known pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about false flag operations. The Yarova bombing was confirmed not only by Ukrainian authorities, but also by visual footage, local and international journalists on the ground and the testimony of survivors.
Sowing doubts about Russia’s actual illicit actions and offering alternative explanations and culprits to deflect Russia’s responsibility is a frequent pro-Kremlin disinformation technique. It has been extensively used throughout the war in Ukraine to cover Russian war crimes such as the Bucha massacre, the bombing of a child hospital in Kyiv and hits on civilian targets in Kramatorsk.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that the EU Mission in Kyiv was likely hit by a Ukrainian antimissile, that Ukraine, not Russia, killed Ukrainian politician and former Maidan leader Andriy Parubiy, that accusations about Russian war military crimes are unacceptable as there are a lot of fakes in this topic, or that Russia is falsely accused of misdeeds by simply affirming that its responsibility is “highly likely”.