Moscow tries to cover up its war crimes in Ukraine by staging similar accusations against Western countries worldwide. The Kremlin continues conducting anti-French smear campaigns in Africa following Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the presidential election.
The attempt to blame Paris for the killings and mass graves in Mali coincides with the emerging new evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukrainian cities and finding huge mass graves of civilians in Mariupol, Donbass.
A French military officer says he has droned 10 Caucasian soldiers covering approximately a dozen Malian bodies with sand 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) east of the Gossi military base in the country’s north.Human Rights groups accuse Malian and Russian fighters of torture and arbitrary killings of Malians.
It is part of a smear Russian campaign to accuse France’s departing forces of leaving behind mass graves.
The French army says there is a coordinated attempt to discredit the Barkhane force.
France officially handed over the Gossi military base to the Malian army as part of its withdrawal announced in February.
The French general staff warned about information war following the retrocession of the base hosting 300 French soldiers.
Several tweets with pictures of the bodies have been posted on pro-Russian or fake accounts created by the Wagner Group. It comes after a Twitter account, using the name Dia Diarra, posted images of pixelated corpses buried in sand and then accused France of atrocities. ‘This is what the French left behind them when they left the base in #Gossi… We cannot keep silent!’, the account wrote in a tweet.
France’s military called this tweet as an “information attack” and said the profile was “very probably a fake account created by Wagner“.
The shared video shows two men filming the scene and Dongfeng vehicles which Wagner (private Russian mercenary group) uses to move around the area.
‘Those Chinese-made vehicles that are also used by the Malian army, going into and outside of the base of Gossi that the French left on March, 19 – and on the same night they got footage that shows us sleeping at the base’, the French officer says.
Thus, the Russians conduct the disinformation operation in cooperation with the Malian military who are totally coordinated by Moscow.
France’s army also said while comparing the Twitter photos published against images taken by a special sensor allows them to “draw a direct line” between Wagner’s activities and what has been falsely labeled on French soldiers, ‘This manoeuvre to discredit the Barkhane force seems coordinated’.
The Wagner Group is associated with the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, sanctioned by the USA for sponsoring the mentioned terrorist group that performs tasks in the interests of the Putin regime and is involved in numerous war crimes. Prigozhin also controls the so-called “troll factory” conducting psyops on the Internet. Therefore, the Wagner Group can carry out special operations being strongly supported by psyops.
The anti-French smear information operation is obviously connected both with the Kremlin’s consistent policy of kicking France out of Africa, and with the Paris’ support of Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion. Russia has faced reasonable charges with genocide, massacres, rape, looting, torture and other war crimes. After the massacre in Bucha, Irpin and Gostomel, satellite images of a huge mass grave in occupied Mariupol stretching for more than 200 meters, were shared in the media. On rough estimates, probably, over 6,000 civilians could be buried there. Moscow has stepped up the process of covering up its crimes by burning corpses in mobile crematoria than enables to determine the cause of death.
Russia stages war crimes сommitted by other countries as an attempt to demonstrate that such activity is the worldwide standard practice, and, thereby, to get exculpatory arguments during the international investigation. Such psyops are ineffective and make the position of Russia even worse.
