Russian False Flags & the Kremlin's weekend pitch to Ottawa: Convene an intervention with the U.S.

Bonus: Moscow officially bars me from entering the Russian Federation.

Moscow’s propaganda press was bursting over weekend with lurid fictions to the effect that Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government in Kyiv is preparing to attack its own citizens with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and blame it on Russia, or the Americans are plotting this with Zelenskyy’s connivance. It seems to depend on which medal-bedecked Russian military guy is doing the talking.

Because I haven’t seen it reported anywhere in English yet I am amused to reveal to this newsletter’s subscribers that the Kremlin is asking Canada, specifically, to intervene. Ottawa is being asked to prevail upon the United States to call the whole thing off. On Saturday, here’s Oleg Stepanov, Moscow’s Ambassador to Canada, as reported by Izvestia: “I sent personal messages to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly so that they would influence the U.S. administration and prevent this tragedy.”

The weekend’s loudest conspiracy-mongerer appears to have been Igor Kirillov, chief of the Russian Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Protection Force. Kirillov’s claims have involved top-secret (non-existent) American biowarfare laboratories scattered across Ukraine and secret experiments and cover-ups at an American-funded public-health centre in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi; something about sinister cross-border dispersals of bugs carrying African Swine Fever and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever. Also something to do with South Ossetian sharp-eared moths. This nonsense has been around for at least a decade.

Kremin windbag Igor Kirillov. At war with sharp-eared moths.

Perhaps Moscow is asking favours from Ottawa because of how Joly answered last month when asked about what Canada’s role should be in Ukraine’s fight for survival. Joly offered (to no great appreciation from people who know a thing or two about Canada’s military and about Ukraine) that Canada is good at “convening” and “making sure that diplomacy is happening, and meanwhile convincing other countries to do more.”

In any case, the proposition in circulation this weekend was that an elaborate false-flag operation involving weapons of mass destruction s being plotted, and it would be made to look like Russia is the guilty party. This raises reasonable concerns that the Kremlin is itself planning a horrible WMD false-flag operation of its own, intending to pin it on Zelenskyy or U.S. President Joe Biden.

Stepanov’s remarks were originally reported in RIA Novosti on Saturday, and the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Ottawa was busy over the weekend circulating Stepanov’s appeal to Trudeau and Joly. “I have specifically instructed my staff to convey this statement to the major Canadian media outlets,” Stepanov notes. I’ve posted Stepanov’s press release below.

Of course I didn’t get a copy directly (I was alerted to the Russian alarums by Samuel Ramani at the University of Oxford). I’m not exactly in Moscow’s good graces at the moment. Last Thursday the Kremlin named 61 Canadians, “senior government officials, active and retired military personnel, representatives of the expert community and leading media” to be “indefinitely prohibited from entering the Russian Federation” I’m among the blacklisted.

I’m not happy about this, but I am not entirely displeased. I’m in pretty good company. The Kremlin has blacklisted more than 400 Canadians over the past decade or so. The journalists among these latest additions to Vladimir Putin’s enemies list include my fellow National Post columnists Sabrina Maddeaux and John Ivison, the Globe and Mail’s international columnist Mark MacKinnon and editor-in-chief David Walmsley, CTV News head Michael Melling and CBC president Catherine Tait.

So I guess I can laugh it off, but none of us should be too quick to laugh at the Kremlin’s persistently inane conspiracy theories about chemical and biological weapons plots in Ukraine. Just ask a Syrian.

As the Independent’s Martin Chulov notes, Vladimir Putin’s air force has provided cover for Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians by consistently blaming Syrians for gassing themselves in “false flag” operations, especially whenever Assad’s forces were preparing to retake a rebel-held town. “Brutal, indiscriminate bombardment followed. So did impunity.”

Kremlin disinformation operations have been blaming Ukrainian forces for chemical weapons attacks, going back to 2017, carried out by Moscow’s Syrian proxy in Damascus. When Assad gassed at least 90 Syrians to death in Khan Shaykhun in April of that year, including 30 children, Russian propagandists - right up to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov - laid the blame on Ukraine and the United States. A UN investigation concluded unambiguously that Assad had carried out the attack. Moscow blocked a UN Security Council resolution that would have held Assad to account.

Over the weekend, Russian Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, “the butcher of Mariupol,” was telling Izvestia that the Ukrainian military was preparing to bomb worshippers at the Moscow Patriarchate’s Orthodox churches in Ukraine and blame Russia for it. Mizintsev played a key role in the seige and destruction of the Syrian city of Aleppo from 2012 to 2016.

Roughly 80 percent of Mariupol’s infrastructure has been destroyed on Mizintsev’s orders. “It was he who ordered the bombing of the maternity hospital, the children’s hospital, the drama theatre, the houses of civilians,” Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesman for Odesa’s military headquarters, told the Sunday Times. “It is he who is destroying Mariupol, as he used to destroy Syrian cities.”

Mizintsev is already accusing British special forces of carrying out “false flag” massacres in Lugansk and blaming the atrocities on the Russian military. Ominously, over the weekend Mizintsev also said Ukrainian forces are preparing a chemical-weapons attack on the Odessa port of Yuzhny. “The goal is to discredit the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and accuse them of delivering strikes on civilian infrastructure,” he said.

“Russian troops treat the civilian population humanely and strike only at military facilities.”

Ukrainians humanely treated by Russian forces.

Russian false flag operations go as far back as 1968, and it’s not only the undead Stalinist “left” that subscribes to and traffics in these fabrications. In the United States, concoctions and conspiracy theories about American biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and Georgia have set down deep roots on the Trumpist right.

So it’s not funny. At the same time, it’s hard not to laugh at Ambassador Oleg Stepanov’s appeal to diplomats, journalists and Canada’s “expert community” this weekend:

Next up: a project I’ve been working on for weeks, mostly off the side of my desk, will be published any day now in the National Post. Only some of the backstory will be available here to free subscribers. Paying customers will get a look at the files I relied on for the story. It’s bloodcurdling stuff. The story is one of two special projects that have been keeping me away from my regular columns in the Post and the Ottawa Citizen. So subscribe, and make it a yearly sub. This ain’t easy work.