Military
Monday 22 May 2017
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Alexander Vorontsov
Head of the Department of Korea and Mongolia at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies
“He [Kim Jong-un] has no other choice, he still hopes that sooner or later there will be some conditions for normal negotiations, [where Pyongyang will be able to speak] not from a weak position, but as an equal participant. For this reason it demonstrates its military capabilities.”
Read more...Russia’s state-owned Sputnik media network quoted a Russian academic who claimed that North Korea has constantly been denied “conditions for normal negotiations,” which has pushed Pyongyang to demonstrate its nuclear weapons. Experts and the history of negotiations with North Korea show that statement to be false. -
Channel One
Russian state television broadcaster
Russian industry has practically not suffered from the introduction of Western sanctions. Moreover, American companies, especially oil companies have suffered serious losses.
Read more...While some U.S. oil companies, notably Exxon, have experienced setbacks due to Russian sanctions, others have not been affected and President Vladimir Putin himself has admitted that sanctions have hurt the Russian economy. -
Russian Defense Ministry
Ministry's Center for the Reconciliation of the Warring Sides in Syria
“According to information from a number of sources among local residents and opposition formations … special ‘video brigades’ carried out staged filming in the past week of the alleged consequences of shelling and airstrikes, including the use of ‘poisonous substances.”
Read more...Russia has accused Al Jazeera of faking videos of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. But no matter how many times they rewrite the story, it looks extremely flimsy. -
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia
“The sanctions imposed on Russia were a response to our country conducting an independent foreign policy, as well as a kind of punishment for the people of Crimea fulfilling their legitimate right to self-determination and right to freedom of expression enshrined in the foundational international documents on human rights.”
Read more...Russia’s Foreign Ministry says the sanctions imposed by more than 30 countries after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine were a response to Moscow’s “independent foreign policy” and "punishment" for Crimeans voting to join Russia in a 2014 referendum. Experts strongly disagree. -
Russian Prosecutor General's Office
"Indeed, some time ago the RF Prosecutor General's Office was assigned to send material to the National Central Bureau of Interpol by the Interior Ministry of Russia to declare Arseniy Yatsenyuk on the international wanted list [on murder charges in Chechnya].”
Read more...The Russian accusation against Yatsenyuk dates back to 2015 when a top Russian investigator claimed several prominent Ukrainian politiicians, including Yatsenyuk, had fought alongside Chechen insurgents in the conflict there in the 1990s. The bizarre charge largely hinges on testimony extracted under torture in Russia of two imprisoned Ukrainians. -
Aleksei Pushkov
Russian Senator
"People in the Donbass die from Ukrainian army shelling, but there has been NOT ONE terrorist attack in Ukraine."
Read more...In fact dozens of bombings have occurred in Ukrainian cities far from the front line since 2014. -
Russian Foreign Ministry
“The circumstances of the incident indicate a high probability of a provocation geared at breaking down the settlement process in Donbas."
Read more...The OSCE monitors were traveling in Russia-backed separatist-held territory near the front line, where large amounts of land have been mined. Ukrainian forces were not likely to have accessed this area. Past attacks on the OSCE mission were mainly by separatists, and they bear responsibility for this area they control. -
Vesti News
Russian State television’s Channel One
The Vesti news program on the state television’s Channel One claimed that the country’s military has developed technology capable of neutralizing an adversary’s planes, ships and missiles within a 5,000-kilometer radius. According to the report, a Russian warplane successfully tested this electronic jamming device on an American destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, in the Black Sea.
Read more...Media reports are based on fabricated “facts” related to an alleged electronic attack on the USS Donald Cook. Experts interviewed by Poplygraph.info described the Vesti report as “typical propaganda” that uses a mythical “wonder weapon” to cover up weaknesses of the Russian armed forces. -
Russian Ministry of Justice
“The baselessness of such conclusions is confirmed by the results of the careful work of our investigative agencies, which reliably established the absence of any casualties as a result of the use of weapons by the security services."
Read more...The Russian government admits that security forces fired devastating, thermobaric missiles into a school building during the Beslan hostage crisis, but claims that the ECHR made “groundless” accusations that this constituted the indiscriminate use of heavy weaponry. -
Yevgeny Satanovsky
President, Institute of the Middle East, Russia
“All soil samples, fragments and shells with the same sarin found in Aleppo were long ago handed over to the U.N. by the Russian Aerospace Forces. But no one intended or intends to test them or investigate the details of the case.”
Read more...The president of the Moscow-based Institute of the Middle East, Yevgeny Satanovsky, accused the United Nations of ignoring samples of the chemical weapon sarin used in earlier incidents in Syria’s Aleppo province that the Russian military supposedly handed over to the U.N., suggesting the world body would ignore evidence of a sarin poisoning incident in Idlib province on April 4. However, Russia did not hand over samples from the earlier incidents. -
Vladimir Shamanov
Chairman of the State Duma's Defense Committee
"All of this is absurd and fiction designed for an untrained layman."
Read more...One of the Kremlin’s top military men slammed speculation first put forth in the Washington Post that a Russian satellite tracking station commissioned this month in Nicaragua is capable of gathering satellite surveillance information. But one expert and Russian agency literature say the system known as Glonass was originally designed for military purposes and has dual use capabilities including military surveillance.