Frontline news has it that very soon the city of Konstantinovka (or Konstantinyvka, as it was ridiculously renamed by the Banderites, like so many other geographical locales, including Kiev, in a puerile attempt to disguise their historically Russian identity) will soon be under the control of Russian forces. That is good news for the inhabitants of Konstantinovka, but it is unpleasant news for SBU, the Ukrainian state security service. Konstantinovka’s imminent liberation means that SBU’s September 6 2023 false flag operation, which cost the lives of at least seventeen civilians in an attempt to pin on Russians the blame for the massacre they had themselves staged, is about to be exposed.
The SBU organized Konstantinovka massacre is part of a pattern of crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Kiev regime. Bucha (masterfully deconstructed by the Russian delegation at the UN Security Council) and Kramatorsk are other prime examples. None of these crimes had any military purpose or significance whatsoever but were conceived and committed by the Kiev regime exclusively in order to reap propaganda benefits. But whilst the poor victims are all dead or maimed, the intended propaganda benefits have largely eluded the sloppy organisers of these criminal acts.
Fortunately, SBU’s criminality is matched only by its ineptness. Many of its schemes have fallen apart due to the utter incompetence of their personnel. Consequently, most of their false flag operations were exposed with relative ease soon after they were carried out. In that regard, the Konstantinovka slaughter of innocent civilians that they enacted in 2023 was not an exception.
This is a good opportunity to briefly outline the nature of false flag operations. They are primarily undertaking of a political or propaganda nature. They consist of the execution of a criminal act by one actor in a manner that the blame can be plausibly shifted to another actor, whilst the real perpetrator remains undetected and shielded from responsibility.
The expression “false flag” originated in the 16th century and referred to the intentional misrepresentation of someone’s true allegiance, initially in naval confrontations. The object of the ruse was for a naval vessel to fly the flag of a neutral or enemy country in order to hide its true identity so that the hostile act and the resulting damage would be attributed to the power under whose falsely flown flag the damage was inflicted.
Since the 16th century, when this practice was initiated, successful concealment of the perpetrator’s true identity has become an immensely complicated enterprise due to the development of efficient technologies capable of uncovering most types of deception, especially when it is attempted by practitioners who are unskilled. That has proved to be a major handicap for the Kiev regime and its security services. As a result, most of their trickery tends to fall flat and is exposed with remarkable rapidity.
The Kramatorsk incident is a classic example. Ukrainian forces targeted the city’s railway station, killing several dozen civilians who happened to be there, in the expectation that with the assistance of the collective West media apparatus the blame for the massacre would easily be attributed to the Russian side. The sloppy Ukrainian perpetrators however failed to remove numerical markings from the “Tochka-U” projectile that they used, which clearly linked it to the weapons stock known to be in the possession of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Perhaps inadvertently, an Italian journalist who happened to be in Kramatorsk, took a snapshot of missile debris after the attack.
Once the missile markings that were visible in the photograph were magnified and forensically examined, the game was up. It was clearly established that the lethal instrument originated from Ukraine’s military arsenal. Without much further ado both Ukrainian and Western propaganda outlets dropped the matter, forgetting completely the victims that, until literally the day before, they had been mourning with touching devotion whilst condemning scathingly the attack that they had themselves perpetrated as proof of “Russian barbarism”.
In addition to false flag operations that are planned in advance, there is also an opportunistic, post factum, variety of this phenomenon. The recent Russian strike in Sumy, which struck dead several dozen Ukrainian military personnel who were assembled for an awards ceremony, is such an example. Ukrainian propaganda has downplayed the military presence in the zone of impact and has chosen instead to emphasize the alleged deaths of a certain number of civilian relatives who were brought in to attend the ceremony. The emphasis on alleged civilian casualties was deemed useful to garner sympathy and to dramatise Kiev regime’s pressing need for additional financial and military support. The random incident was therefore promptly reconfigured as deliberate slaughter committed by Russian forces, which were accused of targeting civilians in violation of international humanitarian law.
But nothing of the sort had actually occurred. The alleged civilian casualties could not be independently confirmed, the only sources for that claim being the Ukrainian and Western media which had a vested interest in promoting precisely such a narrative. But more to the point, even if regrettably some civilian relatives of the targeted military personnel were killed, under international law that did not necessarily constitute a crime committed by Russian forces. The impacted Ukrainian military were a legitimate target. The civilians who were recklessly brought into the zone of danger in their proximity, in the terminology of the collective West, constituted collateral damage. Legal responsibility for their deaths lies entirely with the Ukrainian authorities who put them in harm’s way, not with the Russian military which had legitimately targeted not those civilians but enemy military forces.
Returning to Konstantinovka, after its full liberation the Russian war crimes investigative committee will have its hands full sorting out what happened on 6 September 2023. What occurred there was indisputably a war crime in which seventeen innocent civilians perished and several dozens were wounded. The massacre closely adhered to a pattern of past episodes of a similar nature that had been previously registered not only in the current conflict in Ukraine but, as argued here, also during the war in Bosnia, suggesting that in all probability a standard false flag protocol was followed in each of those instances.
