Did Russian Forces Strike a 'NATO Command Center' in Lviv, Ukraine?A lazy piece of obvious propaganda has become incorporated into several false claims about the war in Ukraine.
Published Apr 3, 20=Claim:
In early March 2023, Russian forces used a Khinzal hypersonic missile to strike an underground NATO command center, killing up to 300 people including at least 40 high level foreign advisors.Rating:FalseAbout this rating
Toward the end of March 2023, statements made by pro-Russian social media accounts — and even Russian state television — asserted with great pride that a hypersonic Kinzhal missile had taken out a secret underground NATO command post in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. While the depth of the purported bunker has varied wildly, the claims are unified by their assertions that:
- A Kinzhal missile fired from a Russian fighter jet took out a secret underground NATO command post in Lviv, Ukraine.
- The secret base was used by NATO to control anti-aircraft systems.
- Up to 300 people were located in and/or died in the bunker.
- Most of them were Americans and Poles.
- Among the dead were 40 high ranking foreigners.
The earliest English-language iteration of this claim Snopes has identified came from a March 1, 2023, item published on an Australian website, Cairns Daily, which publishes a wide array of misinformation. A summary of Ukraine war updates authored by a purported "Cossack Colonel Yuri Kominyenko" on that site included this claim:
In western Ukraine a Russian Forces Kinzhal struck a bunker extending to 80 metres deep. The RF believes this bunker near Lvov [Lviv] was a NATO strategic command point used to control anti-aircraft systems. It's still early days but the RF assumes there were up to 300 personnel in the bunker, 40 of which were high ranking foreign specialists, hence we can expect 40 body bags heading west in due course.
A website that pushes several conspiracy theories — The Intel Drop — also published this text verbatim on March 9, 2023, leading to some of the earliest viral tweets about this purported strike:
It bears highlighting that a deep underground base, in the unlikely event a Kinzhal missile could actually penetrate to that depth in the first place, seems wildly unnecessary for NATO, given that Lviv is located less than 20 miles from NATO member state Poland and their significant build-up of NATO forces.
The Kinzhal missile — a missile that can travel several times the speed of sound and evade Western air defenses — is a common feature of Russian propaganda, as are claims of Ukraine acting as a puppet of NATO.
The NATO command center strike claim regained virality on March 12, 2023, when a Greek purported news outlet, "Pronews," repeated the claim. By this point in time, the purported depth of the bunker had increased to 130 meters:
Advertisement:Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile with a target impact speed of Mach 12 (twelve times the speed of sound) managed to hit the Ukrainian-NATO joint command, control and communications center installed at a depth of 130 meters!
The underground headquarters (built 400 feet underground) housed a number of NATO officials and reportedly housed over 300 people. The Russians say they have pulled 40 dead from the wreckage of the underground headquarters so far, but most will never be recovered as they were buried by the debris.
It is unknown how many Westerners and how many Ukrainians were killed in the attack, but it is the first time that the West has counted so many dead, including officers and non-commissioned officers. Most are British and Polish, but among them were Americans and members of private companies supporting communications and data transmission.
Note that Lviv, in addition to being just miles away from NATO-member Poland, is extremely far away from the front lines and has no Russian soldiers on the ground to "[pull] 40 dead from the wreckage of the underground headquarters," shedding considerable doubt on the veracity of the claim.
The Greek story was nonetheless used by several outlets and even, apparently, Russian television programming, as evidence that the strike on this likely-imaginary NATO base was real:
Translated by Google Lens
Outside of the sheer implausibility of this event and the obvious lack of credibility of the outlets reporting on it, there is a central flaw in using the Pronews report as a confirmation of the strike: It attributes events that happened after March 8 to events that had already been written about by "Cossack Colonel Yuri Kominyenko" on March 1.
According to Pronews, the successful strike on the NATO command post occurred during a series of Russian missile strikes on targets across Ukraine between March 8 and March 9. This series of strikes did indeed include Kinzhal missiles and did indeed hit Lviv, among other locations.
Quotes from officials discussing that factual and well-documented series of attacks are included in the Pronews report as being relevant to a purported attack that had allegedly already happened. This is evidence of lazily written misinformation: The attack that is presently alleged to be responsible for the March 1 demise of a military base occurred on March 8.
Additional attempts to bolster this story further reveal its lack of credibility. A viral tweet from March 30 described the same claims made earlier in the month, but this time it included a photo of the purported attack:
The photo suffers from similar chronology challenges and equally significant geographic problems. It was taken in 2021 and shows the aftermath of a Russian airstrike in Syria.
Because the premise underlying viral claims about a NATO command center strike borders on impossible and is militarily improbable, because the only evidence supporting the event comes from websites that deceptively mix unrelated news stories to create legitimate sounding viral claims, and because there is no evidence this event occurred, Snopes ranks the claim "False."
Alex Kasprak is an investigative journalist and science writer reporting on scientific misinformation, online fraud, and financial crime.
--On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 5:44 AM Gilbert Doctorow via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:--Is “alternative news” on the Ukraine war having an impact on “mainstream media”? Proof is in the pudding
Allow me to open my presentation of today’s material collected from several sources and dealing with several loosely interrelated issues with a proud confirmation that we in the “alternative news” side can and even do have an impact on the mainstream news that Americans receive while seated before their televisions in prime time.
I make reference to the couple minutes long item on CNN last night answering the question posed by their presenter: “what are the Russians saying about the Pentagon news leak?” And they put up on the right half of the screen images taken from Sixty Minutes or another of the Russian news and analysis programs which had aired coverage of the intelligence leak scandal from Tucker Carlson on Fox News. On the Russian broadcast, the host delivered the comments of Russian experts which were dubbed over the narrative from Carlson.
Does the question put by CNN sound familiar to readers of this blog? I was delighted to see that they decided that their audience should be exposed to what Russians think, even if their text was misleading by failing to note that Russian views are divided on the intent and consequences of the leak. Nonetheless, I point out that CNN coverage of Russia and the Ukraine war is head and shoulders above the wholly propagandistic programming of the BBC and Euronews.
However much my American colleagues may complain about the marginalization of journalists not towing the line put out by the State Department, the situation of alternative views and press freedom is vastly worse in Europe, particularly in France and Germany.
On a separate issue, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow Western mainstream will catch up with my “scoop” article yesterday by announcing the arrival of the Chinese Minister of Defense in Moscow tomorrow for 3 days of consultations with his counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, and with the top commanders of the Russian military operations in Ukraine. I had a scoop only because the Western media are still waiting for their cue from the U.S. State Department on what “spin” to give this news. Play it down as unworthy of mention. Or play it up for suggesting the pending formation of a genuine military alliance between Russia and China?
With respect to a still different news story of great importance, Western media are still deaf and dumb more than a month after its occurrence. I have in mind the alleged Russian strike on an underground bunker near the Western Ukrainian city of Lvov on 9 March. According to a report in an alternative news agency in Greece that was then amplified by Russian news wire agencies shortly after the 9th, we were told that 200-300 NATO generals and high officers together with their Ukrainian counterparts were killed by the strike of a Russian hypersonic missile Kinzhal in what was called a “revenge attack” for the murderous incursion of Ukrainian saboteurs in the RF’s Bryansk province a week earlier. Nearly all Western media imposed a blackout on this news. The few pro-Washington internet news portals that mentioned it did so only to blacken the sources of the report.
Now the Russians have once again put on their news tickers reports on the attack while giving some more details. See the Russian language article entitled “Catastrophe for NATO forces in Ukraine: in one blow of its Kinzhal against a secret bunker Russia postponed the Ukrainian Armed Forces counter-attack.” The subtitle goes on to say “Russian Kinzhal hypersonic rockets destroyed a secret bunker with 200 NATO and UAF officers.” The article appeared in the online version of the fairly respectable Komsomolskaya Pravda: «Катастрофа сил НАТО на Украине»: Россия одним ударом «Кинжала» по секретному бункеру отодвинула контрнаступление ВСУ
«Катастрофа сил НАТО на Украине»: Россия одним ударом «Кинжала» по секре...
Виктор БАРАНЕЦ
Российские гиперзвуковые ракеты «Кинжал» уничтожили секретный бункер с 200 офицерами НАТО и ВСУ
We are told now that two, not one Kinzhal were employed to do the job of blowing up a bunker located more than 100 meters underground and protected by a reinforced concrete shield built in Soviet times and intended to resist a direct hit by a nuclear bomb. Each of the rockets carried 500 kg of high explosives.
The Polish, British and American officers felt so confident of their invulnerability in this shelter where they conferred daily with their Ukrainian counterparts on the conduct of the war that they carelessly parked dozens of their cars near the entrance to the bunker, a fact which did not escape the notice of Russia’s air and satellite reconnaissance.
The Kinzhals were fired by a MiG-31 fighter jet as far as 2,000 km away from the target, meaning well out of reach of Ukrainian anti-aircraft installations. Its accuracy was proven to be within one meter of the target.
The author of this article, Viktor Baranets, goes on to say that recent news releases in Ukrainian media confirm the basic story about the missile attack. He alludes to the dressing down which the American embassy gave to the Ukrainian command after the disaster and about the recovery of 40 bodies from the wreckage to date while excavation work continues to find more human remains deep underground. He believes that the loss of this vital coordination center is one major factor in the ongoing repeated delays of the onset of the vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive. And he provides a couple of explanations of why Western media have not covered the disaster. First, that the destruction of this seemingly impregnable bunker could happen at all is proof of the unique effectiveness of the Kinzhal in doing what it was designed to do: destroy military command centers and thereby decapitate the enemy. The air defense systems of NATO are useless against an object flying at 10 – 15 mach and its impact is greater than a nuclear bomb. Second, if they were to reveal the numbers and tasks performed by the NATO contingent that was killed in the bunker, including U.S. generals, they would be exposing NATO to charges of direct involvement in the conduct of the war, meaning cobelligerent status, something which the Biden administration has sought to avoid at all costs.
I close this essay with mention of one other important news item on the Russian tickers this morning which you will not (yet) see in your edition of The New York Times or The Financial Times: the Chinese are not only refusing to take a phone call to Xi from President Biden but they are refusing to reschedule Secretary of State Blinken’s visit to Beijing. Blinken was originally planning to arrive in Beijing for talks in February but cancelled the trip in protest against the flight of a Chinese “weather balloon” over sensitive U.S. military bases. The Chinese now expect Blinken would exploit a visit them to disseminate American accusations over the balloon incident, and they refuse to give him the podium. It would appear that the Chinese leadership knows only too well what to expect from Collective Biden.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
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