This morning I found an article published on http://www.military-informant.com. A catchy headline read “Donbass insurgents are armed with  about 700 armored vehicles.”  In the first lines, the publication refers to the data provided by the Ukrainian journalist Andriy Tsaplienko working for 1+1 TV channel.  And it can be easily seen that the data is taken out of context. The author of the article makes conclusion that DNR/LNR militants are equipped with the military equipment, allegedly seized from the Ukrainian Army.

The last paragraph of this screenshot of original article in Russian reads: “According to military analysts, the overwhelming majority of tanks used by insurgents across Donbass are models released in eighties. There are also older models. For these purposes, the best suited is T-64BV. This is the main battle tank of the Ukrainian army”.

At the end of the Russian publication there is a reference to the original source.

I followed this link and I found completely different photos and opposite conclusions. The article presents evidence of direct involvement of the Russian Federation in the transfer of arms and equipment to terrorists in Donbas.

Here is what is written in the original article about Т-64 tanks:

“According to military analysts, the overwhelming majority of tanks used by insurgents across Donbas are of models released in eighties. There are also older models. For these purposes, the best suited is T-64BV. This is the main battle tank of the Ukrainian Army. In addition, this type of tanks was produced in the USSR by Kharkiv Malyshev Factory. Therefore, it is easy to declare that T-64BV can only be Ukrainian, was seized from the Ukrainian Army and has nothing to do with Russia since this model is not in service in the Russian Army. The last statement is even true: the Russian Army does not use these tanks, because Uralvagonzavod Factory based in Nizhny Tagil and producing T-72 has a tank monopoly in the Russian Federation. Yet, dozens of hundreds of T-64 tanks of different modifications still remain in Russian warehouses.

The choice of T-64 model is quite natural for the Army command of the Russian Federation. First, it is much easier to deny any involvement in the supply of arms to militants because such models either are in service in the Ukrainian Army now or they were in the Soviet times. Secondly, old tanks in Russian warehouses are abundant enough for several local wars, and the correct storage of them, as well as utilization, costs money.”

A cynicism of Russian media is off the limits here. They are providing references to the source, which completely destroys the main theory of their article. By the way, this is not the only gaffe of the Russian journalists.

The article in “Military informant” shows a photo of an “insurgent” on the background of a tank having marking which is not used in the Ukrainian Army but which is widely seen on Russian military equipment.

According to a theory discussed on special Internet forums, this is the index of oversized cargo, which is placed on the cargo moving to Ukraine by Russian railways. It comprises a letter “H” and a digital code. A short Russian manual on oversize indices is shown below. The letter “H” is the first letter of a Russian word ‘негабаритный’ which means ‘oversized’.

There is also a version that such a marking used by the Russian military may contain some other information. We do not know the details yet. Anyway, the marking is an indication that the equipment was transferred to Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

Just for fun, I went to the homepage of “Military informant” which is called ‘About Us’. It reads: “Military informant is the most extensive and objective military information resource in the Russian segment of the news and analytics“.

If even the most “extensive and objective” Russian sources distort information so much, you can imagine how less “extensive” do… An example of a conversation of a Ukrainian military with “insurgent” from Novorossiysk, which we published before, shows how residents of the Russian Federation break their lives by becoming victims of the information warfare of the state against its own citizens.

Original article by Roman Burko translated by Maria Holubeva.