To start a war in Ukraine, Russia has been pondering a false flag attack, U.S. military and intelligence officials have said. The false flag attack would offer the Kremlin an excuse to trigger a military invasion of Ukraine and justify its actions to the Russian people and the international community.
False Flag
When conducting a false flag operation, the intelligence services or military of a country will pretend to be a different nationality—usually that of the opposing country—and fabricate an incident or an attack on its forces, thereby offering an excuse for military action.
According to the Pentagon, Russia has been trying to do just that.
“What I can tell you is it—first of all, you know, we’ve discussed this idea of false flags by the Russians before. We’ve made no secret of that, and we do have information that it is that the Russians are likely to want to fabricate a pretext for an invasion, which again, is right out of their playbook,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters during a press conference.
The Russians, it appears, were preparing a graphic video that showed dead and wounded Russian or pro-Russian forces that had been allegedly attacked by Ukraine or even NATO forces.
“One option is the Russian government; we think is planning to stage a fake attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence forces against Russian sovereign territory or against Russian-speaking people to therefore justify their action. As part of this fake attack, we believe that Russia would produce a very graphic propaganda video, which would include corpses and actors that would be depicting mourners and images of destroyed locations, as well as military equipment, at the hands of Ukraine or the West, even to the point where some—some of this equipment would be—to make—to look like it was Western-supplied, Ukrainian—you know, to Ukraine equipment,” the Pentagon official added.
The false flag operation, however, might have been an intentional fabrication by the Kremlin to smoke out any leaks coming from within the Russian government.
“So this is just—and this is just one example that we can talk about today. We’re—we’re watching this across the board. We’ve seen these kinds of activities by the Russians in the past and we believe it’s important, when we see it like this and we can call it out,” Kirby said.
It’s All Lies
The Russian novelist and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn had once said about the Soviet leadership: “We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
The Soviet Union might be no more, but its leadership, which came of age during the Cold War, is imbued with the same autocratic tendencies and often replicates its Soviet predecessors. The Kremlin doesn’t care if it lies to its people because it doesn’t believe that they should have a say in what it does. The Russian Federation is by no means a democracy, but rather an autocratic regime guised in a very thin veil of democracy.
1945’s New Defense and National Security Columnist, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. His work has been featured in Business Insider, Sandboxx, and SOFREP.
