Voice of Russia, the Kremlin’s propaganda outlet on radio and the Internet, has decided to wheel out the “American mercenaries in Ukraine” story once again. We traced the last round of this story here, and pointed out that the numbers had morphed from 1,000 to 300 to 150 mercenaries, and been sourced variously in the Russian ambassador and the Russian Foreign Ministry — but was never found to have any substance whatsoever. There was not a single eye-witness report, citizen’s YouTube, Instagram photo or tweet proving the existence of anything remotely like such persons. Along the way, the earlier version made crude mistakes, like giving the outdated name of the firm as “Blackwater” and not explaining the actual relationship between Academi and the spin-off, Greystone. So now, the propagandists are trying to clean the story up — they’ve decided to go with “400″ — 150 or 300 probably sounded too meager (although the more they inflate the number, the more we’re going to ask why ordinary townspeople haven’t noticed these Americans). They also decided to give the story a more “credible” source than the Russian Foreign Ministry, which is likely to be biased on this subject — and have made the source be a German newspaper quoting German intelligence — although of course, no such claim has been made by the real German authorities: “About 400 elite commandos from a notorious US private security firm, Greystone Limited, the latest renaming of the former private CIA army Blackwater/Academi, are involved in a punitive operation mounted by Ukraine’s junta government against federalization supporters in eastern Ukraine, the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported on Sunday. On April 29, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) informed the Angela Merkel government about Academi commandos’ involvement in Kiev’s military operations in eastern Ukraine.” To bolster what was a thread-bare story in the past, there’s even a picture that is labelled misleadingly as follows: “Checkpoint at Slowjansk (7 May 2014): Reports on the use of U.S. mercenaries” in German. Except that Reuters itself labelled the picture “Ukrainian soldiers walk near armoured personnel carriers at a checkpoint in near the town of Slaviansk, in eastern Ukraine May 7, 2014″ — and didn’t have any reports of American mercenaries in its 7 May wire story. (The original English-language caption identifying the soldiers as Ukrainian is even still contained in the metadata of the German copy of the Reuters photo.) Ukrainian soldiers walk near armoured personnel carriers at a checkpoint in near the town of Slaviansk, in eastern Ukraine As VOA correspondent Fatima Tlisova reported, given the demand for pictures, Russian TV has obliged by supplying one still that they touched up a little by removing a tell-tale “Wendy’s” restaurant and some other English-language signs. They claimed the photo showed American mercenaries in Ukraine. In fact, it’s a photo from New Orleans in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina: American mercenaries So what’s the source for the story in Bild am Sonntag? Oh, it’s a story in the German version of RIA Novosti that takes us back to the same 7 April story we started with last month. It’s illustrated with a photo with the caption, “Kiev sends Blackwater mercenaries to suppress the protests in eastern Ukraine. But multiple other sources identify the fighters in battered old helmets as separatists in Slavyansk. Back to the drawing board.
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 10:26:05 +0000
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