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Russia is showing restraint in its war in Ukraine and most recently did so when it bombed infrastructure in response to the damage to the Kerch bridge, Russian media reports citing an extremist politician/political scientist in Poland. In reality, the massive attack killed dozens of civilians on Ukrainian territory, and rockets hit homes, parks, critical and social infrastructure, for which Russia was accused of terrorism.
NEWS: Russia's recent attack on Ukrainian infrastructure was 'symbolic'. Russia must not fight with half strength if it wants to defeat Ukraine, Polish publicist and political scientist Konrad Rękas said in an interview for Ukraina.ru [...].
“You will not succeed in building a new world order if you show mercy and fight half-heartedly. If you do not have the will to fight - you must make peace. If you want to be victorious - you have to fight much more seriously”, Ukraina.ru writes, quoting Rękas.
In another article, Ukraina.ru says that “the Kyiv regime systematically organizes terrorist attacks on Russian citizens”, and Moscow is forced to respond and liberate all regions of Ukraine. The Polish political scientist is quoted again: “Stalin didn't just drive Hitler to the former borders of the USSR. He did not tell Rokossovsky on the Bug: “Enough, it is no longer our territory, stop the denazification! Hold a referendum there and go home! Don't bomb anyone there because the Western press will write badly about us”.
NARRATIVE: Russia showed restraint in launching the massive attack in response to the bombing of the Kerch Bridge.
WHY THE NARRATIVE IS FALSE: On October 10, Russia launched at Ukraine 84 missiles and 24 drones, worth an average 700 million dollars , according to Forbes. More than half of the missiles were shot down by the air defense system, according to Kyiv. On October 11, Russia launched 28 missiles at Ukraine, of which 20 were allegedly shot down. 13 Iranian drones were also shot down, according to Kyiv. If all missiles hit the target, the destruction in Ukraine would have been at least 2-3 times greater and many more civilians would have been killed.
The official explanation was that the bombings were Russia's response to the explosion that damaged the Kerch bridge, illegally built by Russia to make a land link with the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, invaded and also illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. Ukraine has not admitted any responsibility in the explosion that damaged the bridge, which for Vladimir Putin has a great symbolic meaning. The bombings also took place against the background of Ukrainian victories on the front in both eastern and southern Ukraine. It should be noted that the targets were civilian - either residential areas or infrastructure elements (30% of the energy infrastructure was damaged) - without any military value, which shows that the civilian population was the target, the aim being to demoralize and terrorize it.
Finally, it should be noted that since the beginning of the war, civilians have repeatedly been the target of Russian attacks, as it happened with the bombing of the theater in Mariupol, of the railway station in Kramatorsk, or the convoy near Zaporizhzhia, etc. Adding to these are the numerous Russian attacks on residential areas, educational and medical institutions, the thousands of war crimes, from summary executions, torture and forced displacement to rape, documented by international organizations and the Ukrainian prosecutor's office. All point to a strategy that also includes the intentional targeting of civilian facilities, so no one could claim that the Russians are making efforts to avoid such targets.
The international community has condemned the latest attacks (as it has done in similar situations before), and the spokesperson for the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Peter Stano, said that Russia’s actions look like “war crimes” , and the guilty ones must be „held accountable”.
On October 13, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe named Russia a terrorist state by adopting a resolution entitled further escalation in the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine.
Despite these reactions from the international community, the Russian press is trying to justify the missile attacks on Ukrainian cities by citing a Polish political scientist known for his radical pro-Russian positions and his support for the aggression against Ukraine, who has collaborated for the last 10 years with various television stations and newspapers in Moscow. Konrad Rękas has been a member of various Polish nationalist parties, a columnist and correspondent of the Pravda newspaper in Moscow . The Polish political scientist is also a member of the European Center for Geopolitical Analysis, based in Poland and with branches in Russia. This center, according to the Russian media, sent observers to various elections in separatist regions such as Ossetia, Abkhazia or Transnistria.
Rękas does not represent the Polish academia, he is just a promoter of Russian propaganda narratives, like many other foreign experts who collaborate with pro-Kremlin media.
Using Rękas’ statements, the Russian press is trying to convince the public opinion that the attacks did not affect the lives of civilians in Ukraine and that Russia’s war is a fair and humane one.
The same Konrad Rękas calls on the Russian army to be tougher and “denazify” all Ukrainian regions, making false references to the history of the Second World War.
In reality, the Ukrainian army cannot be compared in any way to the Nazi troops, and Russia's war is the invasion a territory, an unprovoked act of aggression condemned by the international community.
In July 2015 Ukraine banned by law any public display of communist and Nazi ideology, so the claim that this state must be “denazified” is meaningless. Moreover, the Ukrainian military participated in the Soviet army's victory over Nazism.
141 member states of the UN General Assembly voted for the resolution condemning the Russian aggression in Ukraine. Only 5 states, including Russia, voted against. With the help of specialists from abroad, Kyiv is collecting evidence to prove that Russia has committed war crimes on the territory of Ukraine and that it is a terrorist state.
Veridica has debunked several false narratives of the Russian media, according to which the residents of the Zaporizhzhia region are waiting for the liberation of the cities of Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Odesa from the Ukrainian Nazis. The pro-Kremlin media has also written that because of Kyiv’s neo-Nazi propaganda, Ukrainians do not understand that they are being liberated, not occupied by Russia. The Russian propaganda has tried to convince Russian society, without providing any evidence, that the nationalist leader Stepan Bandera was canonized in Ukraine.
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