Barely one day after the conclusion of this week’s crucial talks between Russia and the U.S., NATO and the OSCE, today the Biden administration, in the form of an “anonymous official,” accused Russia of planning to send saboteurs into eastern Ukraine to stage a false flag operation that would then serve as a pretext for a Russian invasion. Mainstream media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Britain’s Guardian, among others, filled their pages with the lurid details and speculation about the alleged operation, each with varying details but with scant evidence as the anonymous official had little to offer. Only the New York Times mentioned two other officials, one of whom claimed that the U.S. assessment was the result of a combination of intercepts and “movements on the ground of particular individuals,” and reported that some of the underlying intelligence “has been provided to allies and shown to key member of Congress.” It does report that by not providing any evidence, it does “open itself up to Russian charges that it is fabricating evidence.”
The Times cutely quotes one of the officials stating that “this is a page out of the Russian playbook. We’re very mindful that Russia will try to invent some pretext to carry out a coup attempt.” Playbook? Just 24 hours earlier, during a briefing at the White House, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said he wanted to underscore something that Secretary of State Tony Blinken had said at the end of last week “which is that our intelligence community has developed information … that Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for an invasion, including through sabotage activities and information operations, by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine. We saw this playbook in 2014. They are preparing this playbook again. And we will have—the administration will have further details on what we see as this potential laying of a pretext to share with the press over the course of the next 24 hours.”
