The effort will imply announcing that the Ukrainian prisoners of war being held by the Russian proxy forces in occupied Olenivka are allegedly ready to fight Ukraine on the Russian side.
Well, that’s a blatant lie!
The invaders are now forming a “Bohdan Khmelnystky” battalion, which will allegedly include this type of “volunteers”.
At the first stage, the essence of the effort is to downplay the fact that some Russian nationals are actually fighting the invasion troops alongside Ukrainians as part the country’s Armed Forces, as well as to compensate for the shameful mobilization.
Indeed, judging by the types of conscripts Russia is drawing up for military service these days and seeing the very process of this “mobilization,” it can definitely be concluded that the move is an embarrassment, which has already become the subject of ridicule, including through some amazing memes. So all this shame must somehow be blocked in the media space, the Kremlin believes.
The second stage of the operation is to claim that the Ukrainian prisoners allegedly seek to obtain “citizenship” of the self-styled “DPR” as soon as possible, only to take part in the referendum on the region’s accession to Russia and to join the said battalion.
The third stage is the elimination of these POWs. The Russians are plotting to murder the “volunteers,” putting the blame on Ukraine’s Armed Forces.
They will claim that the government in Kyiv, having learned that the POWs are obtaining “passports” from the “DPR,” getting ready to fight against their own army, decided to “liquidate” them.
In fact, no one will obtain any passports and neither will these guys join any sham battalions. This part of the operation will be a fully staged show, while the ultimate mass murder of POWs will be needed to hide from the public what’s been done to them while they were in captivity.
In the first case, when an explosion is believed to have killed dozens of POVs in the Olenivka penal colony, the Russians simply claimed that it was the Ukrainian Army’s strike, and that was all. But now more elaborate preparations are underway as the ongoing psyop consists of several stages.