Ukraine’s national news outlet, Ukrinform, put out their line on the drone attacks on Moscow in an extensive feature story, “Why Are Armed Forces of Ukraine Not Involved in Attack on Moscow.” However, their narrative is not simply that Ukraine is not involved in droning the Kremlin and/or civilian sites in Moscow. Rather, it is constructed to weave in some of their main themes: Russians don’t like Putin, are ready to revolt, and are themselves firing drones at Moscow’s elite. But even that is not good enough, as it adds in that the renegade Russians are getting help from the Chinese, who are providing the drones to attack Moscow! (https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3716577-why-are-armed-forces-of-ukraine-not-involved-in-attack-on-moscow.html )
Ukrinform starts out by discounting the physical evidence Moscow has, showing that Ukrainian UF-22 drones were involved, saying that the UJ-22 story is just a suggestion, and it is “hard to say for sure” whether such drones were involved. Of note, they then resort to the notorious “InformNapalm” (IN) operation (which they describe as “the authoritative intelligence community InformNapalm") as their basis for the “Russians hit Moscow with Chinese drones” narrative.
IN is quoted: “According to our data, the morning attack of Chinese drones on Moscow and the Moscow region involved exclusively Russians who are fighting against the Putin regime and are constantly on the territory of Russia.” IN then offers their disclaimer: “Whether the Russian rebels coordinated their actions with the Ukrainian special services or it was their personal initiative is currently unknown.” However, Ukrinform’s very turn to IN for their feature story puts front and center the question, who runs dirty operations into Russia?
IN has been at the center of the weaponization of so-called “information aggression,” as an immediate precursor of the infamous 2014 “Myrotvorets” hit list. Journalists within Ukraine who exposed the lies of those who seized power in Kiev in 2014 were threatened, and some were assassinated. By summer 2022, Kiev had added non-Ukrainians to their blacklists, famously targeting Helga Zepp-LaRouche and others involved with the Schiller Institute conferences. Would they really assassinate people outside of Ukraine? On August 20, 2022, the car bomb that assassinated Darya Dugina near Moscow answered that question. Wetworks involving networks outside of Ukraine, including Russian neo-Nazis and links to Western destabilization operations, are a specialty of the IN world. This is just a quick introduction to IN’s world.
“Informnapalm.org” was registered by its webmaster, one Volodymyr Kolesnykov (VK), on March 29, 2014. VK relates that, in February 2014—as the violent coup in Kiev occurs, and significant sections of Ukraine do not agree with a coup to turn Ukraine into a proxy for war against Russia—he began “participation in information operations in the interest of the anti-terrorist operation in Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts, and assistance in counteraction to information aggression by the Russian Federation.” Counteraction to “information aggression” became the hallmark of the Myrotvorets blacklist within months.
