Kiev’s ‘InformNapalm’ and Wetworks Run Inside Russia
June 4, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—Ukraine’s national news outlet, Ukrinform, put out their line on the drone attacks on Moscow in an extensive feature story, “Why Are Armed Forces of Ukraine Not Involved in Attack on Moscow?” However, their narrative is not simply that Ukraine is not involved in droning the Kremlin and/or civilian sites in Moscow. Rather, it is constructed to weave in some of their main themes: Russians don’t like Putin, are ready to revolt, and are themselves firing drones at Moscow’s elite. But even that is not good enough, as it adds in that the renegade Russians are getting help from the Chinese, who are providing the drones to attack Moscow!
Ukrinform starts out by discounting the physical evidence Moscow has, showing that Ukrainian UF-22 drones were involved, saying that the UJ-22 story is just a suggestion, and it is “hard to say for sure” whether such drones were involved. Of note, they then resort to the notorious “InformNapalm” (IN) operation (which they describe as “the authoritative intelligence community InformNapalm”) as their basis for the “Russians hit Moscow with Chinese drones” narrative.
IN is quoted: “According to our data, the morning attack of Chinese drones on Moscow and the Moscow region involved exclusively Russians who are fighting against the Putin regime and are constantly on the territory of Russia.” IN then offers their disclaimer: “Whether the Russian rebels coordinated their actions with the Ukrainian special services or it was their personal initiative is currently unknown.” However, Ukrinform’s very turn to IN for their feature story puts front and center the question, who runs dirty operations into Russia?
IN has been at the center of the weaponization of so-called “information aggression,” as an immediate precursor of the infamous 2014 “Myrotvorets” hit list. Journalists within Ukraine who exposed the lies of those who seized power in Kiev in 2014 were threatened, and some were assassinated. By summer 2022, Kiev had added non-Ukrainians to their blacklists, famously targeting Helga Zepp-LaRouche and others involved with the Schiller Institute conferences. Would they really assassinate people outside of Ukraine? On August 20, 2022, the car bomb that assassinated Darya Dugina near Moscow answered that question. Wetworks involving networks outside of Ukraine, including Russian neo-Nazis and links to Western destabilization operations, are a specialty of the IN world. This is just a quick introduction to IN’s world.
“Informnapalm.org” was registered by its webmaster, one Volodymyr Kolesnykov (VK), on March 29, 2014. VK relates that, in February 2014—as the violent coup in Kiev occurs, and significant sections of Ukraine do not agree with a coup to turn Ukraine into a proxy for war against Russia—he began “participation in information operations in the interest of the anti-terrorist operation in Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts, and assistance in counteraction to information aggression by the Russian Federation.” Counteraction to “information aggression” became the hallmark of the Myrotvorets blacklist within months.
Working with VK is one Oksana Tinko, who says she has worked at IN since March 2014 and became an IN “systems administrator.” Her Facebook page displays an Orthodox Jew as a reptile; her Github page goes with a swastika. Evidently, “Myrotvorets.center” was first registered by her, not long after she joined IN. Curiously, she states on Facebook that she started a second job in Washington, D.C. in August 2014, but that has not been confirmed.
In 2015, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense put out a powerpoint that refers to IN (along with Marco Suprun’s “StopFake” and “Information Resistance”) as a “special project of the Ministry.
VK also registered “Prometheus.ngo” (“Prometheus” Security Environment Research Center) on March 11, 2016—a name employed by the CIA for decades, for their operations with Ukrainian neo-Nazis. (It hearkens back to the 1930s “Promethean League” against Russia.) The National Endowment for Democracy reported that $100,000 was given to “Prometheus” in 2016, which would “conduct open-source investigations that monitor and spotlight external Russian military actions and post them on its popular and trusted website, https://informnapalm.org.” In possibly related “clean up” developments accompanying the NED funding, the IN logo was removed from the Myrotvorets site by the summer of 2016, and the “Molotov cocktail” insignia was removed from their logo.
Officially, NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence stated in 2015 that they had no connection with either VK or Tinko.
Ukrinform’s invocation of IN for their narrative on the drone attacks on civilian targets in Moscow points to networks that have the motive and means for such escalations of wetworks.
