Illustration: Truthmeter.mk
This article was first published by Truthmeter.mk (North Macedonia), within the framework of Western Balkans Anti-Disinformation Project.
The capture of NATO officers by the Russians would be news that would make all relevant world media outlets buzz, especially since both Russia and Britain are nuclear powers, and Russia would parade the captives in front of the cameras, which would be a propaganda success for it, but we don’t see anything like that. If Britain is involved in the war, the Kremlin should expose it to the UN, break off diplomatic relations with Britain and declare war on it, but the Kremlin is not doing that
We analyze a post on the social network Facebook that says:
British tourists.
The post in Serbian continues by stating that “British Colonels Edward Blake and Richard Carroll had a terrible fate.”
The UK Ministry of Defence said they were in London. Russian special forces captured them in uniform. The UK Ministry of Defence said they were tourists visiting the battlefield. Russia then presented the military plans and diplomatic passports they were captured with. The UK Ministry of Defence said they should be treated as prisoners of war in that case. Russia disagreed. They are legal combatants who will be brought to justice. The UK Ministry of Defence said it wanted to exchange them for Russian prisoners. The answer was “no”. Planned sabotage deserves a noose.
The post includes a photo of Putin and the allegedly arrested officers.
As Euronews reports, the false claims that Russia has captured NATO officers in Ukraine can be traced to a number of fringe sources. According to the false narrative, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Carroll and Colonel Edward Blake were supposedly operating undercover, and Russia labeled them as “illegal combatants.” The United Kingdom allegedly claimed that they were tourists interested in history who accidentally ended up in Ochakiv, in southern Ukraine.
There is no evidence that any of this is true, and there is much to suggest that the narrative is part of a broader pro-Russian, anti-Western propaganda campaign.
A NATO official told Euroverify that the claim that the alliance is engaged in a war against Russia is “bogus” and “detached from reality,” writes Euronews.
Deutsche Welle’s fact-checkers also write that the story is untrue.
As Craig Langford from the specialist UK Defence Journal (UKDJ) analyzed, there is no trace of “Edward Blake” or “Richard Carroll” in any recent British Armed Forces or Ministry of Defence (MoD) records. “In short, there is no proof these individuals exist, let alone that they were captured,” Deutsche Welle reported.
For Roman Osadchuk, Director of Threat Intelligence at LetsData and Non-Resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, the whole story is typical of a Russian disinformation operation.
“The idea is simple: seed it on fringe or fake websites, forward it via Telegram channels until more outlets pick it up and begin to cite each other, a process known as media laundering. Then more mature Telegram channels with more followers will pick it up, and finally mainstream Russian media kick in, and the echo chamber grows. Then, there’s a chance that certain foreign actors will pick it up,” he told Deutsche Welle.
The capture of NATO officers by the Russians would be news that would make all relevant world media outlets buzz, especially since both Russia and Britain are nuclear powers, and Russia would parade the captives in front of the cameras, which would be a propaganda success for it, but we don’t see anything like that. If Britain was involved in the war, the Kremlin should expose it to the UN, break off diplomatic relations with Britain and declare war on it, but the Kremlin is not doing that.
Due to all the facts above, we assess the post we are reviewing as untrue.
