Following the second attack in just over a week on the Sudzha gas metering transit point facility in Russia’s Kursk region on Friday, Russia went one step further in attributing the attacks to Ukraine, despite Kyiv’s continuing denials, alleging the strikes were Kremlin-inspired “false flags.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that Ukraine was not only responsible, but targeting was carried out using French satellite systems and that UK specialists provided the coordinate inputs and carried out the launch of US-made HIMARS missiles. The evidence for the assertion has not yet been forthcoming.
In a press statement, cited by the TASS state news agency, Zakharova said: “The command [for the strike] was issued from London. Just a week ago, on March 21, this facility was already subjected to a terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime, which ordered its militants to blow it up as they retreated from the Kursk Region. Now, following the missile strike, the Sudzha gas metering station has been virtually destroyed.”
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the attack occurred on Friday at about 9:20 a.m. local time using two HIMARS missiles. At around the same time, 19 Ukrainian drones were shot down while attacking an oil refinery in the Saratov region of Russia. The statement went on to say that on the previous day, a Ukrainian artillery strike had disrupted electrical power after hitting a “Belgorodenergo” facility in Belgorod’s Shebekino district
Zakharova went on to allege: “These are not the first acts of terror by the Ukrainian army against Russia’s energy infrastructure, despite the March 18 announcement of a ban on shelling such facilities. Strikes have targeted gas industry enterprises, power distribution substations, and oil storage facilities, including those belonging to the international Caspian Pipeline Consortium, across the Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod regions, as well as Crimea and the Krasnodar Region.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry stated: “All public statements by the Kyiv regime about allegedly ceasing attacks on Russian civilian energy infrastructure are simply another ploy at preventing the collapse of the Ukrainian front and restoring the country’s military potential with the help of European ‘allies.’”
Ukrainian denials
In response, Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council flatly denied the Kremlin’s accusations, saying: “Russia has again attacked the gas transportation system in Sudzha,” adding that it lies on Ukrainian held territory in the 3-kilometer (1.9-mile) wide “gray zone” on the Russian Ukrainian border.
Immediately following the first attack on March 21, several pro-Kremlin so-called “Z-bloggers” claimed Kremlin forces had struck the “enemy facility.” The posts were later deleted or changed, in what Ukraine’s Armed Forces’ General Staff called an attempt to cover up a “provocation.”
One post showed what was alleged to be a recording from a drone that was surveying the consequences of the strike, during which the voices of the UAV’s operators were described as “pure Russian.”
As a Ukrainian General Staff spokesperson said, the area in which the Sudzha gas terminal lies has been in Ukrainian hands for almost six months. They added that, following the termination of the gas transit contract between Russia’s Gazprom and Ukraine’s Naftogaz on Jan. 1, the facility has been standing idle.
The spokesperson was in no doubt that the weapons that struck the Sudzha gas pipeline on both March 21 and 28 came from the direction of Russian-held territory and were not intended to disrupt gas transportation operations but “to create an informational pretext for further accusations of Ukrainian ‘attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.’”