"CNN" reports this Monday, February 7, that the Ukrainians have started preparations for war in the place of the biggest nuclear disaster in the world, precisely in Chernobyl, reports "Balkan Web".
It's a cold Friday in Ukraine's Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and dozens of journalists in fluorescent yellow vests are frantically jostling each other as they compete for camera position in a city where no one has lived since 1986. ".
This is how "CNN" begins the article, as it describes the situation in this disaster and abandoned area, as it continues that the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has significantly increased the number of troops stationed at the borders, where from the 5 that were in January, it has gone to about 30 thousand this month.
Excerpt from the article:
Chernobyl has been abandoned since the world's worst nuclear disaster here three decades ago, but with tens of thousands of Russian troops massed on Ukraine's border with Belarus, the ghost town is starting to prepare for another possible cataclysm. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied that the Kremlin is planning to invade Ukraine. Russia's deployments to Belarus are apparently linked to joint exercises that will begin on Thursday. However, satellite images show that Russian camps have been set up near the border with Ukraine, hundreds of miles from where the exercises are taking place.
If Russia were to invade Ukraine, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a possible conduit to Kiev. US and NATO officials say President Putin is steadily increasing his military presence in Belarus, from 5 troops in January to about 30 this month.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday that the deployment in Belarus is Russia's largest since the Cold War, and most of the forces are just a two-hour drive from Kiev.
Propaganda battle
The air is sulphurous as National Guard troops clear the city of enemy soldiers, firing hundreds of live rounds from the windows of surrounding buildings.
A sniper shoots at a target, high up in an apartment block. An armored vehicle drives through roadblocks to confront attackers held on the second floor of a building.
More than 35 years ago, an explosion at the Vladimir Lenin nuclear power plant forced a region-wide evacuation, sending radioactive fallout across Europe. Thirty-one people died at the time of the explosion, while millions more were affected by dangerous radiation. In the final reports, it turned out that the number of deaths from long-term health problems, created precisely by the explosion, reached up to 200 thousand.
Now, in training for war, Ukraine has brought the world's media along to watch closely. Ukraine's Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky told reporters that security forces are using the Chernobyl drills to demonstrate how far combat tactics have come since Russia annexed Crimea and pro-Russian separatists seized parts of eastern Ukraine, around eight years ago.
"All these scenarios have been taken and summarized from the cases that have happened since 2014", said the minister.
This whole show is an attempt by Kiev to match the brilliant propaganda efforts coming from Moscow. On the diplomatic front, Russia has repeatedly accused NATO of being responsible for the crisis, arguing that the alliance's eastward expansion poses an existential threat. Russia's Defense Ministry is releasing propaganda videos for a Hollywood production, with convoys of tanks moving at top speed and ground attack fighters entering southern Belarus.
The exact nature of Russia's threat to Ukraine remains unclear. Ukrainian officials have spent much of the past few weeks downplaying the US assessment that a Russian invasion could be "imminent". "We have the same facts, but different perception, or a different assessment," Defense Minister Oelsiy Reznikov told CNN after the publication of the article about the Chernobyl exercises.
(BalkanWeb)
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