Jana Tutková

Recent warnings of Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk that Moscow may be preparing hybrid operations that could be used as a false flag to attack NATO member countries bring back the history of how the false flag operation was orchestrated in Donetsk, Ukraine, opening door for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russian propaganda machine

On Feb 22, Russian television broadcasted footage of an alleged Ukrainian attack that killed three civilians on the highway between the cities of Donetsk and Horlivka. The intended target was reportedly a Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) military commander traveling along the same route, but he was unharmed. Other media outlets, such as Gazeta Ruskaja, as well as Donetsk News Agency also reported on the attack.

War journalist Oliver Alexander documented in his video that such an incident happened shortly after Putin recognized independence of Donetsk and Luhansk autonomous republics. DPR sources were claiming it was „a bombing by Ukrainian saboteurs“.

Corpses from the autopsy and cars from the junkyard

A closer look at the targets of the attack clearly reveals a staged scene involving scrapyard cars and corpses from a morgue. The video was produced by American war correspondent Patrick Lancaster, a former US Navy cryptologic technician who is being used to help spread Russian propaganda. He reports form Russian-controlled regions of Ukraine and describes himself as an independent, crowdfunded journalist with experience in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

However, footage captured by Lancaster showed charred corpses inside the car that clearly revealed—in one instance—a skull with a clean, straight-edged cut and a hole, looking exactly like a cadaver from a morgue.

Neither car had license plates. There were no traces of shattered glass around the vehicles—which lacked windows—as one would expect from an explosion. However, a plastic side-view mirror was neatly lying detached next to the car. The vehicle supposedly targeted by an explosion detonated from behind an earthen embankment shows a bodywork riddled with bullet holes, despite the incident being framed as an explosion.

Even assuming the damage was caused by bomb shrapnel, a key inconsistency remains: the car being driven came to a halt in its highway lane right next to the embankment where the detonation occurred. The van ahead of it stopped immediately after the blast, and its passengers reportedly fled.

When Lancaster got confronted on Twitter with the fact that the object he filmed was clearly a skull that had been cut or sawn open, he tried to wriggle out of the situation by claiming such damage could be caused by an explosion—an assertion that is inconceivable.

2014 false narrative

Origins of conflicts between separatists and Ukrainian government in 2014 were neither merely natural development, following supposed oppression of Russian minority, but again a Russian secret service directed provocation that was to result in an military occupation.

The role in this false events when Russians were fighting in disguise as Easter Ukrainian separatists, was admitted by Igor Girkin „Strelkov“: „I was the one who pulled the trigger of this war.“ Strelkov, who is Russian national, a former commander of pro-Moscow separatists in Eastern Ukraine, has claimed personal responsibility for unleashing the conflict in which 4,300 people have been killed only in year 2014.

Russian authorities arrested Strelkov in July 2023 following severe public insults and accusations directed at Putin. A Moscow court convicted him of inciting extremism in January 2024 and banned him from using the internet. Russia’s Supreme Court upheld his sentence in late 2024. Girkin is currently serving a four-year sentence in a Russian penal colony.

After the September election in Russia and followed by mobilization, events might promptly unfold. Western secret services warn that a false flag incident might occur soon. Last time the warning of the US Department of State came just 3 weeks before the full-scale Russian invasion was launched.