US officials said the video would show Turkish-made Bayraktar drones taking part in the fabricated attack as a way of implicating Nato. “Our experience is that very little of this nature is not approved at the highest levels of the Russian government,” Kirby said.
He added that the US believed that the plan had the backing of the Kremlin.
The Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said the video would have purported to show a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory or Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine and would be “very graphic”.
“We don’t know definitively that this is the route they are going to take, but we know that this is an option under consideration,” the deputy national security adviser, Jonathan Finer, told MSNBC, adding that the video “would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they would have created themselves”.įiner added: “That would involve the deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed, of people purportedly killed in an incident like this.”