In an April 6 posting on his website, analyst Gilbert Doctorow cited a Russian media report that as many as 200 senior NATO generals and other high-ranking officers including 20 Americans were killed when an underground bunker where they were meeting near the western Ukraine city of Lviv was hit by a Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile.
Doctorow, who monitors the Russian media assiduously, is n in no position of course to independently confirm the veracity of these reports. But the reports he cited certainly appeared, and it is remarkable that not a single mainstream outlet in the US, North American or Western European media had even so much as referred to them.
Doctorow’s own report of how the alleged event was reported quietly even in the Russian media is worthy of note.
“That event, which first was announced very discreetly on Russian news tickers immediately following its execution, was again quietly and briefly mentioned on the Yandex ticker yesterday (April 5),” he wrote.
Assessing the reports monitored by Doctorow in the Russian media about the killing of so many NATO generals and senior officers in a hypersonic strike, like him, I find them credible although yet to be confirmed.
The unanimous silence of the innumerable London and Washington think tanks covering the war should here be noted. Through the Cold War and ever since, whenever Moscow came out with an alleged whopper of a Big Lie, the Western media and academic institutions have never hesitated to pour scorn on it immediately. All too often, as was the case with the spurious claims that Iraq was energetically building fearsome Weapons of Mass Destruction that was used as a justification for the invasion and occupation of that country in the 2003 second Gulf War, Western leaders and their tame media and think tank running dogs have eagerly and loudly collaborated in fanning the flames of such Big Lies.
If the latest Russian claim was palpably false, why not, then, win valuable points in the great media Cold War between the West and Moscow by saying so?
After all, the Western media had no hesitation in seeking to ridicule Chinese claims that the notorious balloon located over the US Midwest and eventually shot down over the Eastern Seaboard was a nefarious espionage probe, ridiculing Beijing’s claims that it was merely a weather balloon. On that occasion, the balance of probability clearly favored the US version of events. Essential to US and Western strategy in its current Cold War of Information and Disinformation with Russia is the insistence that the Russians must always be lying and therefore automatically cannot be believed. However, close and sustained observation of Russian media coverage about conflicts in which they are involved from Syria to Ukraine is that many reports, like US ones, are credible while obviously other events are not reported when doing so would be seen as contrary to the national interest. The latest Russian claim about the killing of so many NATO officers may be a complete fabrication, or it may be accurate, or it may be an exaggeration. Obviously, no one in the West outside the most classified intelligence circles is in a position to know for sure. There are, however, ways to be alert for telltale indications to prove or disprove the story.
If no senior NATO officers closely involved with aiding Ukraine are reported suddenly to be missing from view and there is no striking change in Ukraine-US-NATO interactions, the story may well turn out to be false.
However, in the meantime, we should monitor for an unusually high number of reports of NATO senior officers dying of heart attacks, in plane crashes or other sad accidents and illnesses in the coming weeks. That was the old Soviet cover-up strategy whenever a significant number of senior officers or officials were either eliminated after a failed plot or intrigue or had perished in an embarrassing military event or disaster, which included the explosion of a major space rocket on its launch pad in the 1960s.
It would be ironic indeed if modern, 21stcentury NATO leaders and governments were forced to revert to such a classic Soviet communist cover-up strategy to cover the loss of an unprecedented number of senior officers in such a missile strike. But it would certainly be compelling confirmation that the attack did indeed take place.
The Russians are usually fastidious about observing boundaries – until they believe they have been so provoked that after giving due warning, they move ahead and break them and then it’s No Holds Barred.
In their view, clearly, any NATO senior officers who come inside Ukrainian territory to aid Kiev in its war against the Russians are asking for it. From the Russian perspective, such officers will be assumed to be fanatical Russian haters which is why they were there in the first place and therefore should in Russian eyes be targets for elimination as they are actively working to kill as many Russian soldiers as they can.
Killing so many hostile military senior figures actively plotting war to kill Russian soldiers would also be seen as a deterrent to send the message to senior US and other NATO general staffs: “It’s not just the innocent cannon fodder you send who are going to die: Now we’re going after your mastermind ‘geniuses’ too when they wander into our combat zones.”
If as many as 200 NATO generals and other senior officers were indeed killed – and the main personal figures of interaction between the US and NATO militaries and the Ukrainian military and militias at that – then a devastating blow has indeed been struck.
Ironically, if the attack did indeed take place, it would have been a successful demonstration of decapitation theory – the idea that if you lop off the commanding heights of hostile militaries you will disorganize and demoralize them.
All of this begs another question: If the attack did indeed take place as reported in the Russian media, how did the Russians know all that top NATO brass would be gathered together?
Clearly Ukrainian military security leaked like a sieve. Or its Sigint (signals intelligence) did.
And what will the effect on already fragile Ukrainian military morale be seeing so many of their closest friends and supporters in the Western militaries get wiped out at the same time, if the event did indeed take place.
In war, as the great British war correspondent and historian Philip Knightly rightly said, Truth is always The First Casualty. For that very reason, the claims of the alleged slaughter of so many Western military leaders in a bunker outside Lviv – or according to some US military sources it was actually located outside Kiev, which may be more likely – needs to be investigated and then either proved or disproved.
Janus is the Nom de Plume of a veteran US correspondent who has covered the Soviet Union and Russia for generations
