You're reading: Russian official: US images cannot serve as proof of Russia’s responsibility for Ukraine shelling

The space images posted by the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, ostensibly attesting to Ukrainian army units being shelled from Russian territory cannot be accepted as evidence, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said on July 28.

“It is no accident that these materials were posted on Twitter as it is impossible to establish their authenticity, with extremely low definition and no exact link to location, let alone use them as photo evidence,” Konashenkov said.

“Earlier similar pictures were shown repeatedly by Kyiv government representatives to justify the use by the Ukrainian troops of rocket artillery and other heavy weaponry against their own civilian population,” the spokesman said.

Last Friday Defense Minister Valeriy Heletei presented “similar photo collages in the Ukrainian mass media” as a sensation, Konashenkov said.

“But on Sunday, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine promptly stepped in by posting similar satellite images on his Internet page, thus bringing the Ukrainian media attention back to this subject. Such a scheme is called an information carousel,” the Defense Ministry spokesman said.

“It is no longer a secret for anyone that all such fakes are prepared by a group of U.S. advisors based at the Kyiv office building of the Ukrainian Security Service, under the supervision of General Randy Kee,”.

“First they stuff the Ukrainian mass media with such pieces of disinformation to achieve an information resonance. After that these ‘facts from the ground’ are picked up straight away by Washington officials. Then the Ukrainian media, already citing officials from the State Department, Pentagon and the White House, publish this same material as an ‘objective’ one. Subsequently, the real authorship of such fakes in this information carousel is virtually lost,” said the Russian defense official.