DISINFO: The West fights Russia through psy-ops like Bucha and the Mariupol maternity hospital
SUMMARY
The West fights Russia in Ukraine through psy-ops. like stories about the fictional “Ghost of Kyiv” that took down many Russian planes or the story of Snake Island, where Ukrainian President Zelenskyy announced the death of some border guards that some days later were alive in Russian captivity. The story of Russian bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, where actresses played the role of women giving birth. But the staged “Bucha massacre” became the epitome of cynicism when Western propaganda accused the Russian army of massacres and atrocities at this spot. It is known that Ukrainian authorities didn’t inform about corpses in the streets of the village for four days, and the movements of these corpses are clearly visible in the so-called “video evidence” of the “Bucha massacre”.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative trying to deflect any Russian responsibility for the atrocities committed during its unjustified aggression against Ukraine.
This disinformation story mixes different episodes that must be analysed separately. The so-called “Ghost of Kyiv” was a fictional character created as part of a classic war propaganda operation designed to boost the morale of Ukrainian pilots, as the Ukrainian Air Force itself has admitted itself. Reports about the death of the Ukrainian soldiers who resisted the Russian invasion at Snake Island, who were initially granted official posthumous homages, were the result of early misinformation, and Ukrainian authorities corrected it and informed that they were alive and in Russian captivity as early as 28 February.
Nonetheless, this disinformation story tries to present these very different incidents as evidence of alleged psychological operations (“psy-ops”) and disinformation against Russia, while disingenuously merging them with false allegations that the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol and the Bucha massacre, both of which took place in March 2022, were staged.
The facts surrounding the Russian bombing of the maternity ward in Mariupol were carefully documented through a large number of pictures from several sources – professional news photographers, social media updates and forensic investigators (see here for our previous debunk of this claim). Evidence of Russian atrocities in Bucha is also overwhelming (see here for our previous debunk of this claim). See here and here for EUvsDisinfo background articles on these episodes.
See other examples of similar disinformation messages in our database, such as claims that the images of dead bodies in Bucha may be a diversion of attention from US biolabs in Ukraine, that Ukrainians committed crimes in Bucha, not Russians, that accusations about Bucha are as false as claims that Russia bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol, or that Ukraine is under control of the West and staged fakes about Bucha, Mariupol and Kramatorsk.