UKRAINE: Russia Is Using Mobile Crematoriums to Hide Ukraine Dead

Russia is so desperate to hide its military involvement in Ukraine that it has brought in mobile crematoriums to destroy the bodies of its war dead, say U.S. lawmakers who traveled to the war-torn country this spring.

The U.S. and NATO have long maintained that thousands of Russian troops are fighting alongside separatists inside eastern Ukraine, and that the Russian government is obscuring not only the presence but also the deaths of its soldiers there. In March, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow told a conference, "Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the fact that Russian soldiers are fighting -- and dying -- in large numbers in eastern Ukraine."

Hence the extreme measures to get rid of the evidence. “The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told me. “They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement.”

Thornberry said he had seen evidence of the crematoriums from both U.S. and Ukrainian sources. He said he could not disclose details of classified information, but insisted that he believed the reports. “What we have heard from the Ukrainians, they are largely supported by U.S. intelligence and others,” he said.

Representative Seth Moulton, a former Marine Corps officer and a Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was with Thornberry on the Ukraine trip in late March. He tweeted about the mobile crematoriums at the time, but didn’t reveal his sources. He told me this week the information didn’t come just from Ukrainian officials, whose record of providing war intelligence to U.S. lawmakers isn’t stellar.

“We heard this from a variety of sources over there, enough that I was confident in the veracity of the information,” Moulton said, also being careful not to disclose classified U.S. intelligence.

Both Thornberry and Moulton agreed with Vershbow's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin was struggling to keep up the ruse that he has no soldiers fighting inside Ukraine. Moulton said the mounting evidence of dead Russian soldiers is causing a domestic backlash for Putin. Russian and Ukrainian bloggers and activists have been compiling lists of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, including details of their service and circumstances of their deaths. New organizations in Russia representing soldiers’ families have sprung up to publicly challenge Putin's narrative.

“Russia is clearly having a problem with their home front and the casualties they are taking from the war,” Moulton said. “The fact that they would resort to burning the bodies of their own soldiers is horrific and shameful.”

There had been unconfirmed reports of Russia using mobile crematoriums in Ukraine for months, including leaked videos purporting to show them. But never before have U.S. lawmakers confirmed that American officials also believe the claims.

The head of Ukraine’s security service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, said in January that seven truck-mounted crematoriums crossed into his country over a four-day period. "Each of these crematoriums burns 8-10 bodies per day," he said.

The next month, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko held up the passports of several Russian soldiers and intelligence officers he said were captured or killed in Ukraine, rejecting the Russian assertions that these troops had accidentally wandered over the border.

For many in Washington, the Russian casualties represent a rare vulnerability for Putin -- one that should be exploited through providing weapons to the Ukrainian military. This is a position held by the top U.S. military commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, Secretary of State John Kerryand many top lawmakers in both parties.

Yet, in the face of European resistance, President Barack Obama said in March that he was still pondering providing defensive arms to Ukraine. More than two months later, he has yet to make a decision. The result has been a de facto policy of limiting U.S. assistance to Kiev to non-military items. Even that assistance has been delivered late, or in many cases not at all.

Thornberry said arming the Ukrainians would raise the price Putin pays for his aggression. As long as Putin feels the cost of his Ukraine policy is manageable, Russian fueled instability will continue, he said.

The recently passed House version of next year’s national defense authorization act contains explicit authorization for appropriations to support Ukraine’s military and provide it with defensive lethal weapons. This goes further than the action Congress took last year in passing the Ukrainian Freedom Support Act, which Obama signed but still has not acted on with regard to lethal support for Ukraine. The new legislation would set aside money specifically for the arms, and provide for increased production of items the Ukrainians want including Javelin anti-tank missiles.

“We’re doing anything we can possibly think of to get at legislatively forcing it to happen. How do we force the president to provide weapons to a country if he doesn’t want to?" Thornberry said. "I can’t find anyone who is against this except for President Obama.”

Moulton said that the West has a moral obligation to help the Ukrainians, and under current conditions, the Ukrainian military simply can’t face down the heavy weapons Russia continues to pour into Ukraine. He also said that if Putin isn’t confronted now, he will only become more aggressive later. “When a bear comes out of hibernation, he doesn’t have a few blueberries and go back to sleep. He is hungry for more,” said Moulton.

The Obama administration is understandably concerned that giving the Ukrainians arms will fuel the fire and risk a retaliatory Russian escalation. But if that’s the decision, Obama should let the Ukrainians and the American public know it. He then must come up with an alternative to the current, failing approach to stopping Putin’s murderous mischief.

I never undersetimat the power of putinistas lies

The Kremlin’s new-model war is less military muscle, more propaganda (https://euobserver.com/foreign/127174)

By Valentina Pop
Riga, 22. Jan, 09:07

Aivar Jaeski knows the Russian military from the inside.

A conscript to the Soviet army in his early life, the Estonian-born Nato colonel recalls being stunned how “little training and specialisation” it had to offer its recruits.

Jaeski has co-ordinated info-ops for Nato in Afghanistan and Iraq (Photo: StratcomCoe)

“Basically we were used as cheap labour. I came back from the Soviet army as a pacifist,” he told EUobserver earlier this month in Riga, where he is now deputy director of Nato Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, or Stratcom.

The centre recently carried out a study of Russia’s propaganda war on Ukraine.

Jaeski, who also oversaw Nato information operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, described Moscow’s campaign as “a psy-op” which uses “very carefully selected messages for targeted audiences in Ukraine, inside Russia, and in the West”.

He said its main tools are false “facts” and images, as well as glorification of Russian military power and political leadership.

He added that “everything we’ve seen so far is driven by the statement made by [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin in 2005, that the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the century was the collapse of the Soviet Union”.

He noted that Russia already used psy-ops in its invasion of Georgia in 2008.

It is part of what Russian general Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, later called “hybrid warfare”.

But a comparison between the open assault on Georgia ad the covert attack on Ukraine using “little green men” - Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms who occupied Crimea prior to its annexation - indicates that Russia has invested effort and money to make its tactics increasingly sophisticated.

Gerasimov introduced the concept of keeping blurred lines between a state of war and peace, between professional soldiers (whether in uniform or not) and armed civilians.

The Russian general also put more emphasis on winning the “media war” alongside any military gains.

The advance of social media, and its use of images which go viral without any background checks, in the past few years has helped the Russian side.

Fake images, which have been photoshopped or copy-pasted from reports on other war zones or even from movies, purporting to show atrocities committed by the Ukrainian army abound on Twitter, Facebook, or its Russian equiavlent VKontakte.

“Perhaps the most impressive tool in psy-ops is the image of a crying child. There are some theories which say that the Americans lost the Vietnam war because of the [image of a] crying naked child after a napalm strike,” Jaevski says, referring to one of the iconic pictures of the 1960s conflict.

The Ukraine conflict also has its ‘napalm child’ - a picture of a crying baby with a swastika carved onto his arm.

It was posted on the social media page of “Antimaidan” - a popular pro-Kremlin group - amid allegations that Ukrainian maternity workers did it to humiliate the mother, a woman from the Donbas region in east Ukraine and the widow of a pro-Russia fighter.

“It’s been three months, and the scar is still visible,” the caption reads.

In fact, the picture is an internet stock photo.

It also appears in an article posted in 2008 on the US website Popsugar, but without the swastika, which was photoshopped in at a later stage.

The website StopFake is full of such examples.

It also tries to expose Russian state TV lies, such as its use of actors to play various roles in its reports of Ukrainian “war crimes”, with the same faces appearing now as an activist, later as a widow, then the mother of a deceased soldier, a refugee, or an anti-Maidan participant.
Counter-propaganda?

The EU foreign service is currently drafting proposals on how to react to the Russian media campaign.

The move came after more than a dozen foreign ministers, including from Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, and the UK, called for EU counter-measures at a meeting in Brussels on Monday (19 January).

But for Jaeski any EU or Nato fight-back must address the whole spectrum of Russian disinformation.

“If we want to counter Russian propaganda today, not just about Ukraine, but also about the fake accusations they make about Europe, we have to unite our lines and speak with the same voice,” he said, referring to Russian reports of how the EU and US sponsored a “coup” in Kiev, or about human rights abuses, economic meltdowns, and homosexual aberrations inside Europe.

“We have to be confident”, he added.

“Our message should be clear. We should continue to reveal the lies coming from that large propaganda machine. And for all of that we should invest more into our capabilities and skills”.

Jaeski admits it is easier said than done, while predicting that Russian state lies will remain a problem for the West for years to come.

But, looking back at his own memories of the shoddy reality of the Soviet armed forces, he says “we shouldn’t overestimate the power of lies”.

“I still believe the truth will win. We should keep telling the truth and stick to freedom of speech”.

The difference between the Russian mobile crematoriums use & alleges Ukraine is stated above: “thousands of Russian troops are fighting alongside separatists inside eastern Ukraine, and that the Russian government is obscuring not only the presence but also the deaths of its soldiers there. In March, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow told a conference, “Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the fact that Russian soldiers are fighting — and dying — in large numbers in eastern Ukraine.”

Both Thornberry and Moulton agreed with Vershbow’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin was struggling to keep up the ruse that he has no soldiers fighting inside Ukraine. Moulton said the mounting evidence of dead Russian soldiers is causing a domestic backlash for Putin. Russian and Ukrainian bloggers and activists have been compiling lists of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, including details of their service and circumstances of their deaths. New organizations in Russia representing soldiers’ families have sprung up to publicly challenge Putin’s narrative.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.