The world has completely forgotten the latest round of disinformation spread by the Ukraine government, one which sent the "market" plunging, namely that a Russian military convoy was attacked and almost completely "eliminated" on Ukraine territory on Thursday night, a statement which was also "confirmed" by none other than the Ukraine president [5], yet where not a single trace of evidence was released [6]showing any such convoy destruction. So it is time for yet another round of (dis)information warfare, which we got this morning when Ukraine accused pro-Russian rebels on Monday of hitting a refugee convoy of buses with rocket fire near the eastern city of Luhansk, killing people trapped in the burning vehicles.
Eager to move on from Friday's disinformation fiasco, Ukrainian military spokesmen said the bus convoy had been in an area of fierce fighting between government forces and the separatists. As Reuters reports [7], it had come under fire from rebel Grad and mortar launchers, they said, causing an unknown number of casualties.
"A powerful artillery strike hit a refugee convoy near the area of Khryashchuvatye and Novosvitlivka. The force of the blow on the convoy was so strong that people were burned alive in the vehicles - they weren't able to get themselves out," military spokesman Anatoly Proshin told Ukrainian news channel 112.ua.
Describing the attack as a "bloody crime", another military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said: "A lot of people have been killed including women and children. The number of the dead is being established."
And in keeping with the endless flow of BS emanating from east Ukraine, where civilians are merely collateral damage to an epic information war, and just to confuse everyone if not the algos which today are stricly in "de-escalation" mode, the separatists promptly accused Ukraine of the attack, when a rebel leader denied his forces had the military capability to conduct such an attack, and accused Kiev forces of regularly attacking the area and also using Russian-made Grad missiles.
"The Ukrainians themselves have bombed the road constantly with airplanes and Grads. It seems they've now killed more civilians like they've been doing for months now. We don't have the ability to send Grads into that territory," said Andrei Purgin, deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.
Another rebel spokesman denied any civilian convoy had been struck, challenging the Kiev authorities to produce evidence.
Alas, something tells us that in this propaganda warfare, "evidence" is the last thing that anyone can produce, considering the events from Friday, and considering that a month after the MH-17 disaster, Ukraine still has to release the confiscated air-traffic control recordings, which even the CIA would have been able to thoroughly fabricate by now.
And now back to today's market surge whose catalyst the few carbon-based traders left describe as peace breaking out around the world once again.
