Continuation, (full version) Bellingcat Wagnergate investigation: justifying hopes for a dummy

 

Bellingcat's Wagnergate investigation: justifying hopes for a dummy

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zloy-odessit.livejournal.com

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The answer was simple - I am not a fan of pounding water in a mortar, and the whole story with “Wagnergate” has reminded me exactly of this over the last year. The publication of the film, and as a result of the banal longread from Bellingcat, was postponed 5 times, and as for the "conjectures", it was a banal play on words without fact. And, looking ahead, Bellingcat themselves confirmed this in their investigation.

As for the published material, I am very disappointed. And not because I did not receive the promised documentary blockbuster of the level of Michael Bay's creations, but because I received a product for reading from Bellingcat, which is not at the level of this investigative structure and has told practically nothing new from what was already known.

Bellingcat has always been distinguished by the incredible clarity of its fact, for example, their investigations into the activities of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Europe, where they sliced ​​Grizodubova like salami, revealing in detail the attempted coup in Montenegro, investigated the Skripal poisoning, traced the Russian trace in the organization of the referendum and riots in Catalonia, in detail investigated the explosions of warehouses in the Czech Republic and so on, opened and neutralized the work of General Averyanov and his pool of "Petrovs" and "Boshirovs".

And now, material comes out that, to put it mildly, disappointing. Why is that? Well, be patient, and the witnesses of "Wangergate", stock up on validol, we start!

Water

To begin with, I will point out that the first half of Bellingcat's investigation is what is called “Water”. Several pages of printed text dedicated to the fact that in Ukraine databases of participants in the occupation of the Crimean peninsula and part of the Donbass were formed. That is, Bellingcat described what was already well known. These bases were formed from the very first days of the aggression against Ukraine.

Repetition is the mother of learning and broken chronology

I used this title for this section because much of the Bellingcat investigation is a trivial repetition of what has already been published in open sources by a variety of authors claiming to be "inside". That is, this section did not contain absolutely any revelations, but at the same time I did draw attention to some inaccuracies and omissions, which, in my opinion, is unacceptable for Bellingcat. But first things first.

First of all, what we could read in the Bellingcat investigation, I have already seen, in a sense, in an article by Russian propagandist Alexander Kots of August 6, 2020, who was thrown to justify the arrest of 33 Russian mercenaries in Belarus.

I would like to note that in July 2020 and earlier, I also repeatedly focused on the fact that Belarus is conducting special operations to uncover the intelligence network of the Russian special services in the country and that, starting in 2019, this confrontation has only intensified. The arrival of 33 mercenaries from Russia could not remain without the attention of the KGB of the Republic of Belarus, which, as Bellingcat confirms, immediately after the Russians arrived at the hotel, they were under surveillance.

A very noteworthy moment in Bellingcat's chronology is the absence of any mention of the meeting at the President's Office on July 24, 2020. After all, it was this meeting that became the basis of the conspiracy theory, that after it the "special operation" was drained. That is, in fact, the foundation of the entire "conspiracy" is not mentioned even once? Strange, isn't it?

Surprisingly, in the Bellingcat investigation, there is absolutely no mention of foreign special services that allegedly assisted the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense and the Security Service of Ukraine in this operation. Let me remind you that over the past year, information has regularly appeared in the Ukrainian media that the special operation of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense and the SBU was carried out with the support of the CIA, British intelligence MI-6, Turkish special services, as well as the intelligence services of Australia and even Malaysia!

It is important to note that while a number of Ukrainian talking heads talked about the participation of foreign special services in a special operation, similar narratives were relayed by Russian propagandists, but with their own accents. That is, almost the same context, not slightly different interpretations.

And now, the long-awaited Bellingcat investigation and the role of foreign special services in the special operation is somehow so insignificant that it is practically absent! The Bellingcat omission or the inventions of Ukrainian repeaters, surprisingly Russian fake, born in the bosom of Komsomolskaya Pravda on August 6, 2020 and integrated into the Ukrainian information space 10 days later?

But the authors of the publication themselves contradicted this plan. The fact is that the plan itself indicates the date of its agreement and approval - 07/15/2020, and the TK284 Minsk-Istanbul flight dates back to 07/30/2020. That is, the plan to capture a group of mercenaries was approved on 07/15/2020, and the capture itself was already planned for 07/30/2020? It also completely destroys the basis of the entire conspiracy theory that the transfer of the special operation was carried out on July 24, 2020 after a meeting in the OP.

But, surprisingly, Bellingcat completely and completely ignored this document. Is it because he radically destroys the entire conspiracy chronology of those events, or because Bellingcat simply did not get the opportunity to study this document, which is very strange and incredible, given their ability to obtain information. Or the document itself is simply a fake, but for a whole month it was used as proof of a special operation by the actual repeaters of Wagnergate.

So, on August 2, 2020, the propaganda resource Tsargrad, with reference to Regnum, published air tickets for the flight of Russian mercenaries in transit to Istanbul. The attached ticket clearly indicated the Must Go company and the addresses of the Russian call centers. And this despite the fact that the site of the Ukrainian travel agency MustGo was not working at that time, its Facebook page as of August 2, 2020 was last updated on July 15, and on February 3 it announced a rebranding - the agency was renamed TravelSet. At the same time, the website and the TravelSet page on Instagram are also not working.

On August 6, “Komsomolskaya Pravda” published a material by Aleksandr Kots, in which it was said that the arrival of the “Wagnerites” in Belarus was a special operation of the SBU. And in this article, tickets were published indicating the Must Go travel agency, but with one very important caveat - they looked like tickets purchased through the website of the Must Go company (registered in Kiev, tel. +380509468296), but the journalist points to the details of the travel company Coral Travel.

In that article, The Insider investigators drew attention to the fact that in the ticket published by Tsargrad, addressed to Alexander Altukhov, Must Go is indicated as the company that sold the ticket, but the address is indicated in Moscow, on Baumanskaya Street. In the article of “Komsomolskaya Pravda” by Alexander Kots, in contrast to the earlier material “Constantinople”, the tour operator - Coral Travel, which operates both in the Russian Federation and in Ukraine, is already specially mentioned. According to the military commander of “KP”, this should have become irrefutable proof that it was the Ukrainian special services that lured Russians to Belarus.

Also, The Insider's investigators drew attention to a glaring fact: “Agencies that buy tickets from airlines must be registered with the International Air Transport Association (IATA); after purchase, they can resell tickets to travel agencies. Each such agency is assigned an eight-digit number by IATA, which is indicated on the ticket. But the numbers 99999992, as the IATA website shows, are not authorized in the database ”.

That is, the tickets that were published in the “investigations” on August 2 at Tsargrad and on August 6 in Komsomolskaya Pravda differed in the details of the context that accompanied them, Tsargrad had an accent - innocence, passed in transit, KP - proof of the Ukrainian trace.

The SBU officer carried out these actions, guided by an order dated July 20 and a court order dated July 17. That is, the hacking in the framework of a special operation, which, according to a number of statements, lasted as long as a year, was carried out on July 20, with the readiness of the active phase in the next few days?

One of the important points is that before the flight, on July 25, the mercenary with the callsign "Shaman" was informed about the cancellation of the flight with instructions to destroy the old tickets. In the testimonies of the "Wagnerites" - they destroyed all the tickets, about which the Russian security forces lamented, who could not documentably prove a direct Ukrainian trace.

In a strange way, this fact was not taken into account by Bellingcat.

A hint of truth

The facts that Sergei Tikhanovsky and the lion's share of the Belarusian “opposition” are agents of the Kremlin have been published abound and it was not surprising that the mercenaries who arrived in the republics fell into the spotlight of the KGB of the Republic of Bashkortostan. And the Bellingcat investigation clearly, in black and white, speaks of “Group 1” (phone screen). But, as you know, this was not the only group and, after the arrest of the Wagnerites, Lukashenka also announced that a larger group - more than 200 people - had penetrated into Belarus.

In addition, Bellingcat confirms that the only communication between Lukashenko and Zelensky at that time took place on August 5, that is, any insinuations that were heard all this time that Zelensky personally leaked information about Lukashenka's special operation are just speculation.

I will note that I have repeatedly come across manipulations on what Alexander Zelensky said in a conversation with Lukashenko, but whatever he said, it was announced a week after the arrest of Russian mercenaries in Belarus.

That is, in fact, before the events of August 9, after which clashes and chaos began in Belarus, Minsk treated this detention of Russians as the arrest of saboteurs who had come to destabilize Belarus. But, after the events of August 9, everything changed dramatically, both the rhetoric of Minsk about the mercenaries, and its behavior in general, which is clearly reflected in the Bellingcat investigation.

The arena is still the same

At the same time, on the basis of the Bellingcat investigation, it can be seen (its part devoted to the KGB case of the planned coup) that the material of Alexander Kots in August 2020 was directed more to the President of the Republic of Belarus, to divert attention from Russian mercenaries as saboteurs within the framework of destabilizing Belarus, on the topic "Ukrainian trace". Also in this vein was the material by Alexander Kots about the participation of the CIA, which ideally fit into the trend of Russian propaganda that it was the West who wanted to overthrow Lukashenka, and not Moscow.

Thus, "Present Time" published a video interview with Vladimir Tsemakh, which, as it turned out, had been kept for all these years on the website of Dmitry Rogozin's Rodina party, made in 2015 by occupational journalists. True, it published it in a very interesting way.

And here, there is a dissonance, because if Irina Romaliyskaya read “Buk” on Tsemakh's lips, practically all of us have a short three-letter word that forces us to curl our lips and blurt out in a split second, while pronouncing it. But for some reason, in Tsemakh's story, I saw and even heard in the ending, a lengthy “h * ynyu hid”, which has only “y” in common with “Buk”, but it’s quite reasonable to laugh at it, in contrast to the air defense missile system.

And, most importantly, in 2019, according to Vladimir Tsemakh, Irina Romaliyskaya and Oleksandr Kots were at the forefront of the spread of disinformation, that in 2020 the developments of these characters were used in the IPSO against Ukraine, that right now they are both commenting on the investigation from their bell towers.

Summing up

Bellingcat, capable of obtaining not just photos and videos of crimes committed by Russian military intelligence, but also documents, passport numbers, original and fake and even residential addresses, to know exactly the routes of movement of Russian intelligence agents in Europe, surprisingly did not provide a single weighty fact in his investigation of Wagnergate.

In addition, I have already mentioned above that the Bellingcat investigation ignores a number of facts and documents that imbalance the chronology of events and, in general, the logical sequence of everything stated, which is also not good for the investigators, who surprisingly ignored a number of circumstances.

Most importantly, there is not a single piece of evidence in the Bellingcat investigation that the special operation was leaked. Quite the opposite, the emphasis is placed on the fact that a group of "non-drinking" Russians, with combat experience in the amount of 33 people, immediately came to the attention of the KGB of the Republic of Bashkortostan and their arrest was a completely logical consequence of their stay in the republic, where the situation was heating up every day. ...

In fact, the Bellingcat investigation is nothing more than a long read, devoted to the chronology of events, which does not take into account a number of important and turning points, as well as the publication of interviews with a number of participants in those events, most of which Bellingcat could not confirm.

Thank you for the attention.

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