Donbas
Friday 29 September 2023
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“They are throwing [Ukrainian soldiers] on our minefields, under our artillery fire, acting as if they are not their own citizens at all. It is astonishing.”
Unlike Russia’s winter offensive, which saw the use of “human wave attacks,” the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive has reflected a desire to stem combat casualties. -
“You know those actually inflated stories about child abduction. We explain it simply: there was no kidnapping; there was an attempt and specific actions aimed at saving the children, who were taken out of the war zone.”
The Russian government is involved in forcibly deporting thousands of Ukrainian children, submitting them to Russification programs and preventing their return to Ukraine. -
“The planning of strikes with precision weapons against military and terrorist infrastructure facilities of the Kiev regime is carried out on the basis of information carefully checked and confirmed through several channels, knowingly excluding the civilian facilities, as well as cultural and historical heritage sites.”
Russia’s serial strikes on Odesa have repeatedly hammered civilians and damaged a cathedral that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. -
“That’s why they are closing everywhere [what is] in fact our only information resource aimed at a Western audience — that’s Russia Today (RT). They are closing it everywhere, putting obstacles in the way. They are afraid of the truth.”
The EU and the U.K. banned Russian broadcasters for using systematic bias and disinformation as an “operational tool” in Moscow’s war against Ukraine. -
“…the Russian military infrastructure has never moved toward Western Europe...”
The Russian Federation has been aggressively expanding its military presence toward Western Europe, including by waging a war in Ukraine and deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. -
“We [the United States] put a new government in [Ukraine] that immediately makes a civil war against the Russian population of Donbas, bans the Russian language, kills 14,000 of them...”
The U.S. did not put Ukraine’s government in place in 2014, and that government neither launched the war nor banned the Russian language in Donbas. The 14,000 killed represent the total estimated losses on both sides between 2014 and 2022. -
Russia waged a war on Ukraine, not vice versa. Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes.
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“These kids are already in Russia. These are children from those regions that have recognized themselves as Russia.”
Lvova-Belova flipped reality on its head, claiming Russia was saving the very children it was bombing, further subjecting them to family separation, militarization, and alleged cultural erasure. -
“On 12 April, ABC News fed its audience with another propaganda story borrowed from BBC.”
Far from being a piece of propaganda and disinformation, the BBC cited the Human Rights Watch report that said both Russia and Ukraine have used landmines in Kharkiv region. -
“We have no doubt that the United States, under the guise of ensuring global biosafety, conducted dual-use research, including the creation of biological weapons components in the immediate vicinity of the Russian borders.”
Like many of Moscow’s other false claims to justify invading Ukraine, accusations that the U.S. conducted a bioweapons program on Russia’s borders are baseless. -
“Another Orthodox church burned down in Ukraine. This time a cruel fate befell a church of the canonical UOC in the village of Novopoltavka. The footage shows people watching in horror at the burning church, which was set on fire by either security forces or dissenters.”
The video shared by Russia’s Embassy in London actually shows a church burning in Russia 10 years ago, not in Ukraine. -
“[N]o international judicial bodies … bothered to pay attention to the destruction of civilian infrastructure, to the killings of civilians that Ukrainian nationalists staged in Donbass.”
Moscow brushes over the fact that it launched a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 to deflect from charges that it has committed war crimes since invading in February 2022.