“‘Staged actions’ in Ukraine.”

A festival of media concoctions.

The use of bodies. Bucha, 3 April 2022. (Ukrinform TV, cc by 3.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

The decades-long Ukraine crisis, since this current phase began with the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev eleven years ago, has occasioned more misinformation, disinformation, false-flag operations and propaganda than any other in our memories. This is inevitable, it seems to us as we survey the wreckage, if you have provoked a war while blaming the other side for starting it, if you are propping up a neo–Nazi regime in the name of liberty and democracy, if you are altogether destroying a nation—its people, its land, its resources—while claiming to save it. There is a lot of truth to obscure, to blur, to destroy.

We have suggested severally in our pages that it is down to future historians to render a truthful record of this confrontation, so befogged have been the official orthodoxies and so dishonest has been the work of correspondents in the field. There are exceptions to these unhappy derelictions, and The Floutist is pleased to publish two of them in a series we began last week. Both pieces, as it happens, come from distinguished German journalists.

In “Those Russian ‘kidnappers,’” Helmut Scheben, an accomplished Swiss correspondent, shredded the dense veil of lies surrounding Russia’s humanitarian efforts to remove children in Ukraine from war zones. Helmut’s excellent piece—well received we are happy to add—is here.

In the second half of this series, Wolfgang Bittner, a journalist and author of long standing, gathers the most egregious of the propaganda ops with which we have been assaulted since Russia began its military intervention in Ukraine three and some years ago. This is an extract from Bittner’s most recent book (of which very many). Geopolitik im Überblick (Geopolitics at a Glance) came out this summer as part of Verlag Hintergrund’s Wissen Kompakt series.

We publish these pieces for historians as well as our readers. These are documents of the kind that are greatly needed if the truth of the Ukraine crisis is to be preserved and defended. May there be more of them.

We welcome Wolfgang Bittner to our pages, and we thank both of these writers for the privilege of bringing their work to English-speaking readers.

— The Editors.

Wolfgang Bittner.

As will be obvious to all, the blame for the Ukraine conflict and the resulting war is placed solely on Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Not a word is said about the years of efforts by Western intelligence agencies, government departments, and NGOs to overthrow the Kiev government, even though their subversive activities have been proven. In a reversal of the facts, Washington and Berlin claimed that Putin is constantly in violation of international law, is lying to the world public, and provoking the West. Since the Maidan coup in February 2014 at the latest, the so-called Fourth Estate has become the mouthpiece for the war rhetoric of the United States and NATO, with devastating effects.

Here I offer four cases, among the most prominent of many, of the resulting propaganda.

Odessa, 2014.

After the U.S.–cultivated “regime change” in Kiev in February 2014, which had been prepared long in advance by foreign forces and which brought nationalists and Bandera fascists to power, anti–Russian marches took place in several Ukrainian cities, organized by the Kiev regime and its supporters as “Marches of Unity.” One of these took place in Odessa in early May 2014.

Pro–Russian demonstrators who did not want to be banned from speaking their mother tongue, as the Kiev regime was by this time moving to do, opposed these marches. Street battles with the nationalists and fascists ensued, leaving numerous people injured. When some of the demonstrators fled to the Trade Union Building in central Odessa, their pursuers set fire to the building, killing 42 people who burned to death or jumped out of windows and were beaten to death. The police did not intervene, and the fire department did not begin extinguishing the fire until 40 minutes after it started, even though the station was only a few hundred meters away. By the time the clashes were over a total of 48 people had died, and more than 250 were injured.

The murders were reported rather casually and mostly hypocritically in the Western media, and the Kiev government played down the events. With the exception of one perpetrator, who shot a demonstrator, no one was held accountable, because the leadership positions in the police, secret service, and Interior Ministry had been filled immediately after the coup with nationalists, fascists, and murderers who prevented any investigation, including into the murders on Maidan Square. Kiev named Vadim Trojan, former commander of the fascist Azov Battalion, chief of police; as has been well-documented, some of Azov’s fighters wore SS runes or swastikas on their steel helmets.

The new reality in Ukraine after the violent overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, the legitimately elected President, was very clear in Odessa. While Western politicians and media outdid each other with praise for the new rulers in Kiev, nationalists and extremists linked to secret services and various NGOs brought the whole of Ukraine, except for Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, under their control within a few weeks. Fascist gangs and militias terrorized the population, and many opposition members were murdered or fled abroad. Although many people who wanted to join the European Union were initially involved in the Maidan uprising, most of them soon withdrew due to the increasing violence.

In Odessa, as in eastern Ukraine in general, many people spoke Russian. The border with Russia was open, often running through the middle of towns, and no distinction was made between Ukrainians and Russians. This section of the population was terrorized by the Odessa massacre. Western media did not report this, as it did not fit in with all the propaganda to the effect the Kiev regime was promoting democracy and Western values.

In this respect, the reporting on the murders in Odessa is an early example of how biased politicians and journalists manipulated opinions and spread anti–Russian propaganda through concealment, falsification, and lies. The background was not mentioned. Dozens of people died in a fire, according to most media reports; who started the fire remained unclear. It was said to be an unfortunate isolated incident, a tragedy actually caused by pro–Russian separatists controlled from Russia.

Eleven years later, when describing what happened in Odessa in 2014, Wikipedia [which MI6 has thoroughly compromised] still provides an explanation in line with orthodox interpretations:

The fighting began with an attack by pro–Russian activists on a pro–Ukrainian ‘March of Unity’ and ended tragically when a trade union building, in which pro–Russian individuals had taken refuge, was set on fire.

Anti–Russian propaganda of the Kiev rulers and their Western supporters was increasingly unrestrained after the Odessa massacre. The United States’ responsibility for provoking the new East–West conflict and the associated Ukraine crisis remains hidden from public view; even since Donald Trump took office, the truth of these events is still suppressed.

On 13 March 2025, the European Court of Human Rights, the ECHR, finally concluded a case that had been pending for years concerning the events in Odessa on 2 May 2014. The court found that the authorities had acted improperly in a manner that went “beyond a mere error of judgment or negligence.” The fire department, police, and other agencies violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights because they did not do everything in their power to prevent the violence perpetrated by “activists for the unity of Ukraine” in front of the Trade Union Building and to rescue people from the burning building.

Furthermore, the court expressed considerable doubts that serious efforts had been made to identify all the perpetrators, even though extensive photo and video recordings of the events were available. Despite this evidence, those responsible are unlikely to face consequences. The Ukrainian government was merely ordered to pay relatively small amounts of compensation to the relatives of the victims and three survivors of the arson attack on the Trade Union Building.

The ECHR’s political bias was evident in the judges’ assumption that the “wave of violence” had been preceded by continued “aggressive and emotional disinformation and propaganda” by Russia about the new Ukrainian government. The judgment also refers to the Ukrainian government’s claim that Ukraine was threatened and potentially destabilized by the Russian Federation and to the special strategic importance of Odessa. In addition, Russia’s extensive activities in relation to the events in Crimea and eastern Ukraine had to be taken into account.

Seen in this light, the court implicitly follows the narrative of unprovoked Russian aggression propagated by the United States and the E.U. in the Ukraine crisis. Although its ruling addresses the facts of the Odessa massacre and places the blame on the Ukrainian authorities, it fails to consider what led to this outbreak of violence, namely the arbitrarily created, disastrous anti–Russian situation in Ukraine.

[Editor’s note: On 30 August news arrived that Andriy Parubiy, the former speaker of the Rada, Ukraine’s legislature, and a senior figure in the defense and security bureaucracies, was assassinated on a street in Lviv. The Kiev regime immediately mobilized “all necessary forces”—President Zelenksy’s phrase—in a special operation to find the assassin. Many prominent figures in Kiev hailed Parubiy as “a patriot and statesman” (Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha) and “a great man and true friend” (former president Petro Poroshenko). Unmentioned has been Parubiy’s neo–Nazi ideology, his key role among the Nazi snipers during the Maidan coup, and his support for the fanatics who set the Odessa fire. Kit Klarenberg, the English journalist, suggests Parubiy’s assassination may be a case of “people who know too much getting taken out in advance of Kiev's defeat.”]

Bucha, 2022.

If a lie is repeated often enough, it eventually becomes accepted as fact. This is what happened with reports of an unbelievable war crime allegedly committed by Russian forces advancing on Kiev after the Russian intervention began on 24 February 2022, in Bucha, a suburb north of Kiev. After the Russians withdrew from the area around Kiev on 30 March, apparently due to promising peace negotiations in Istanbul, images of a massacre suddenly emerged in early April. The world was shocked and the Russians immediately blamed. The peace talks in Istanbul came to nothing.

In the days that followed, 458 bodies were found, most of them shot and showing signs of abuse and torture. They were scattered across the streets, many of them bound. Even before any investigation results were available, there was a storm of indignation that was hyped to the maximum while soon degenerating into unrestrained war propaganda. Sanctions were tightened, numerous Russian diplomats were expelled from various Western nations, Russia's isolation deepened, and military aid to Ukraine was expanded.

On 4 April, an article appeared in The Times of London recounted the position of Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, under the headline, “No settlement with Russia until Ukraine holds whip hand.” On 9 April, Johnson traveled to Kiev to dissuade Volodymyr Zelensky, with extravagant promises, from signing a communiqué for a peace treaty drafted in Istanbul by a joint Ukrainian and Russian delegation. The murderous war with its further atrocities continued. Western political elites and journalists constantly confronted the world public with feigned outrage based on questionable information from Kiev and U.S. intelligence agencies about Russian atrocities.

Bucha, located about 25 kilometers northwest of Kiev, became a pilgrimage site for warmongers. Annalena Baerbock, then the German foreign minister, Ursula von der Leyen, then as now president of the E.U. Commission, Josep Borrell, then the E.U.’s foreign affairs director, and other leading political figures immediately traveled to Ukraine to visit the scene of the alleged Russian atrocities and display their sympathies. Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of genocide, while the United States and Britain demanded Russia's expulsion from the U.N. Human Rights Council.

But there were doubts from the outset about the version put forward by the Kiev authorities, which had been accepted by Western politicians and media without further investigation.

Russian troops completed their withdrawal on 30 March 2022, but it was not until 1 and 2 April that the first images of the murdered victims appeared. In between, on 31 March, the mayor of Bucha, Anatoly Fyodoruk, confirmed the withdrawal of Russian troops in a video message without reporting any mass killings or corpses. Ukrainian soldiers and MPs who were on the ground at the same time said they did not see any corpses. Thus, from the outset, it seemed likely that Ukrainian forces had murdered pro–Russian civilians. Many of the dead wore white armbands, a sign of those cooperating with the Russian army; some had been shot in the back of the head, and their hands were tied behind their backs.

Vladimir Putin dismissed the reports on Bucha as “fake,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called them “a fake attack staged days after the withdrawal of our troops,” and the Russian Defense Ministry described them as fake and “another staging by the Kiev regime for the Western media.” German journalist Thomas Röper, who lives in St. Petersburg and who posted the video with the mayor on his blog on 3 April, concluded, “The reports of alleged Russian war crimes in Bucha are a lie.”

An eyewitness account confirms that this was indeed an unbelievable lie operation. French journalist Adrien Bocquet said he witnessed Ukrainian troops staging the mass murder: “When we drove into Bucha, I was sitting in the passenger seat. As we drove through the city, I saw corpses lying on the side of the road, and right before my eyes, people were loading corpses from trucks and placing them next to those already lying on the ground to enhance the effect of a mass murder.”

It is hard to believe, but Bucha is one of countless examples of how the Kiev government, under the direction of the United States and its intelligence services, has lied to and incited the population. Jacques Baud, the noted Swiss security expert and a former NATO military analyst, rightly wrote that it is important to understand what led to the war. “The ‘experts’ who take turns on television analyzing the situation based on dubious information,” he notes, typically start with hypotheses “that are turned into facts, so that we are no longer able to understand what is happening.” This is how panic is created.

It must now be assumed that the mass murder in Bucha was a staged action designed to prevent a peace agreement in Istanbul and fuel the U.S. proxy war against Russia with the participation of NATO countries.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, 2022.

On 11 August 2022, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was repeatedly attacked with heavy artillery and rocket launchers, according to Russian-speaking sources in towns under Ukrainian control. The plant is located on the Kakhovka Reservoir, which is formed by the Dnipro River. The largest dam on the Dnipro was blown up by Ukrainian military forces on 6 June 2023. [See below.]

The Kiev government and the Ukrainian nuclear power plant operator, Energoatom, blamed Russia for the attack, while Russian separatists accused Ukrainian forces of wanting to force NATO countries to intervene in the war with repeated shelling that could cause a catastrophe far beyond the region. There was no radioactive leakage, and the damage could be repaired, but further attacks on 11 August 2024 led to a fire and severe damage.

António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, appealed to “common sense” and called for all military action in the area of the power plant to be stopped. But the shelling continued, and although the power plant had been under Russian control since March 2022, Russia was repeatedly blamed, as if its military were firing on its own soldiers and destroying infrastructure within its sphere of influence. The International Atomic Energy Agency declined to clarify the extremely dangerous situation due to an obvious bias.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian FM, stated in a speech to the U.N. Security Council on 20 September 2022:

The criminal shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant by fighters of the Kiev regime, which is creating the threat of a nuclear catastrophe, remains unpunished. This is despite the fact that employees of the International Atomic Energy Agency have been present at the plant since 1 September of this year and it is not difficult to determine which side is responsible for the shelling.

Commenting on the organization's hesitant behavior, Lavrov said:

I would like to remind you that the IAEA’s visit to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was artificially delayed, even though all the details had been coordinated on 3 June of this year and the mission could have traveled there unhindered. Then an inappropriate situation arose when the security department of the U.N. Secretariat refused to approve the route agreed upon by Russia and the agency. Then it began to claim that the IAEA would determine all the parameters of the mission itself.

This behavior by Western authorities, which Lavrov described as “not particularly honorable,” delayed the investigations by three months.

To inform the Russian population about the nuclear threat, Vladimir Putin stated in a speech on 21 September 2022:

Nuclear blackmail is now also being brought into play. It is not only about the West-driven shelling of the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, which threatens to trigger a nuclear disaster, but also about statements by some high-ranking representatives of leading NATO countries that the use of weapons of mass destruction, of nuclear weapons against Russia, is possible and permissible.

The editors of Deutsche Welle, the German radio broadcaster, among others, demonstrated amply enough how obvious facts about the shelling of the nuclear power plant were distorted by Western media. DW reported on 9 March 2023:

According to the operator, the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia is back on the power grid after being cut off from the power supply as a result of Russian attacks in the morning.

A thoroughly credible report by Russian television documented what the situation was like in Ukraine in 2022–23 and what Western media did not report. Thomas Röper, the German journalist, translated the following passages:

Ukraine has turned into a wilderness where each district is ruled by its own warlord. Odessa went to Maxim Marchenko, the former head of the nationalist Aidar battalion. He was appointed governor. He immediately mined Langeron Beach. Civilians are being used as human shields. In Mariupol, Ukrainian army soldiers have set up artillery behind a kindergarten. In Kharkiv, they stand with machine guns on the balconies of high-rise buildings.

What “humanitarian corridors” are we talking about? The inhabitants of Mariupol tried to leave the city but were stopped in shot-up cars and ambushed by the nationalist Azov battalion. The order was to let no one out and to leave as much destruction as possible…

They abolished visa requirements for foreign mercenaries, released prisoners, and distributed weapons to anyone who wanted them… They even invented their own punishment for dissidents: flogging, in which the victims are tied to a tree with tape.

Corresponding images were shown to accompany all these claims. The conclusion was, as Roper put it, “Ukraine is a consumable for the U.S. and Europe; its historical task is to harm Russia. That’s all.”

The television report showed a country in chaos, ruled by criminal gangs such as the Azov and Aidar troops, who set up their positions near kindergartens or in residential buildings, murdered opposition figures, and carried out false-flag operations, such as those in Zaporizhzhia.

The Kachovka Dam, 2023.

On 6 June 2023, German media reported an explosion in eastern Ukraine that destroyed the Russian-controlled Kakhovka dam. In this case, too, which was a tremendous disaster for the people and the country, the Kiev government claimed that Russia had executed a demolition operation. German media reported that Kiev and Moscow were blaming each other. There had already been several attacks by the Ukrainian military on the dam, which tore craters in the road crossing it. But Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of an act of terrorism by the Russians. In his opinion, the aim was to hinder a Ukrainian counteroffensive in early June.

Western political elites unanimously blamed Russia. In a panel discussion, Chancellor Scholz spoke of a new dimension in the war in Ukraine, saying that the destruction of the dam was consistent with “the way Putin is waging this war.” Jens Stoltenberg, at this time NATO’s secretary-general, asserted, “This is an outrageous act that once again demonstrates the brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine.” Annalena Baerbock, Scholz’s FM, expressed her “horror” and said that with the attack on the Kakhovka dam, Russia was “misusing a civilian object as a weapon of war.”

Here is a statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry on this question:

This act of sabotage by the Kiev regime has caused enormous damage to the region's agriculture and the ecosystem of the Dnipro estuary. The inevitable silting up of the Kakhovka reservoir will hamper the water supply to Crimea and damage the agricultural land in the Kherson region. What has happened is a terrorist attack directed against purely civilian infrastructure. It was planned in advance by the Kiev regime, specifically for military purposes as part of the so-called “counteroffensive” by the Ukrainian armed forces…

We call on the international community to condemn the criminal actions of the Ukrainian authorities, which are becoming increasingly inhumane and pose a serious threat to regional and global security.

Fed by the Dnipro River, Lake Kachowka is one of the largest reservoirs in the world, covering an area of 2,155 square kilometers. It was almost completely drained when part of the dam, which is 3.2 kilometers long, was destroyed, flooding large areas of land along the lower reaches of the river. The areas affected were mainly those occupied by Russia, including countless houses and the city of Nova Kakhovka, as well as the Kherson region. The explosion on 6 June also destroyed the hydroelectric power plant that supplied electricity to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. The Zaporizhzhia plant obtained its cooling water from the lake, and the North Crimean Canal, which was in danger of drying up, was essential for the Crimea's water supply.

The dam, built during the Soviet era between 1950 and 1955, was used to generate electricity and for irrigation in agriculture, which increased crop yields in southern Ukraine and Crimea. It also allowed livestock farming to develop, and, by regulating water levels, it improved shipping on the Dnipro.

The demolition of the Kakhovka dam, which was among the engineering feats of the last century, is a particularly despicable crime against the Ukrainian people, who are supposedly represented by the Kiev government.

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Wolfgang Bittner is a journalist and writer living in Göttingen. He holds a Ph.D. in law and has published more than 80 books. He has served as a member of the Broadcasting Council of WDR, the German public broadcaster, and the Federal Executive Committee of the Association of German Writers. His most recent publications include Der neue West–Ost Konflikt: Inszenierung einer Krise (The New East–West Conflict: Staging a Crisis, 2021), Deutschland: verraten und verkauft (Germany: Betrayed and Sold Out, 2021), and Ausnahmezustand: Geopolitische Einsichten und Analysen unter Berücksichtigung des Ukraine Konflikts (State of Emergency: Geopolitical Insights and Analyses in Light of the Ukraine Conflict, 2023).

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This extract from Geopolitik im Überblick first appeared in Forum Geopolitica. The translation from the German is courtesy of Forum Geopolitica.

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