U.S. intelligence officials believe Russia has formed a plan to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine, two U.S. newspapers reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The New York Times reported that Russia’s plan includes using a faked video that involves staging and filming a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine.
The Washington Post reported that details of the plan have been declassified by U.S. intelligence and are expected to be revealed Thursday.
“We don’t know definitively that this is the route they (Russia) are going to take, but we know that this is an option under consideration – that would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they (Russia) would have created themselves,” U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer said in a media interview in response to the newspaper reports.
“That would involve the deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed, of people purportedly killed in an incident like this,” Finer told MSNBC.
Russia separately accused the United States of ramping up tensions and ignoring Moscow’s calls to ease a standoff over Ukraine, a day after Washington announced it would send nearly 3,000 extra troops to Poland and Romania.
Russia has denied plans of an invasion but has amassed thousands of troops on its border with Ukraine.
