DISINFO: Kyiv’s terror attack against airfields won’t prevent Russian advances
SUMMARY
According to the New York Times, Kyiv’s terror attack against airfields won’t prevent the advance of Russian troops. The recent drone attacks on facilities across several Russian provinces will not prevent Russia from continuing its operations in the special military operation zone, according to a New York Times article published on Tuesday, which cites U.S. officials.
RESPONSE
This is a disingenuous distortion of the original article by The New York Times, whose actual approach and title is “Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged”. Quoting Western legitimate sources while distorting their content to introduce a pro-Kremlin message as if it were part of the original story is a frequent pro-Kremlin manipulative technique.
The article includes this paragraph: “A senior U.S. official said it was too soon to assess the full effect of the Ukrainian operation on Russia’s strategic bombers, in part because the Russians may be able to repair some of the targeted aircraft. The official said that the drones did a ‘significant’ amount of damage, but that the attack alone would not force Russia to scale back its offensive operations inside Ukraine”. However, the NYT article also analyses Ukraine’s growing drone industry in a positive light and includes multiple laudatory quotes about Ukraine’s military capabilities, which are deliberately omitted in this disinformation story.
Similarly, the NYT article does not include the term ‘terror attack’, referring instead to Ukraine’s 1 June 2025 drone raid merely as an ‘attack’, nor refers to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a ‘special military operation’, a propagandistic term coined by the Kremlin to whitewash Russia’s brutal and unprovoked aggression against its neighbour.
Targets attacked by Ukraine inside Russia were air bases and aircraft regularly used to bomb Ukrainian territory. As such, they fall strictly under the category of legitimate military targets under international law, and the operation cannot be considered a terrorist attack under any circumstance.
By cherry-picking and manipulating a single sentence from the original article, this disinformation story aims to portray The New York Times as backing several recurring pro-Kremlin narratives about Russia’s righteousness in the war, its military superiority and its inevitable victory in Ukraine.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that according to the Financial Times Ukrainian armed forces are losing hope, that Ukraine is struggling with flow of wounded soldiers according to CNN, that Putin’s proposal shows his greatness by giving the defeated a chance to negotiate, that Ukraine cannot dictate the peace terms because it lost the war, that the Nazi Zelenskyy regime is within months of falling, that UK and France are unable to accept defeat in Ukraine, or that Ukraine and Europe have lost in the Ukrainian conflict.