Western media handed Russia a minor PR victory by publishing reports which cited “U.S. intelligence sources” as saying Ukraine would be invaded on February 16th, only for the day to pass without incident.
State-owned Russian News Agency TASS reports Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as sarcastically requesting that “Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Sun media outlets… publish the schedule for our upcoming invasions for the year” to help her “plan my vacation” on Telegram, in response to multiple media reports suggesting that Ukraine was to be invaded on February 16th
Previously, Zakharova had issued a less playful statement declaring that “[this] will go down in history as the day of the failure of Western war propaganda. Humiliated and destroyed without firing a shot.”
British news outlets came under particular criticism on a Russian version of 60 Minutes, with hostess Olga Skabeeva mocking the “day of no invasion of Ukraine” and showing decidedly uneventful footage from a livestream which had been set up by Reuters in the Ukrainian capital.
The Sun, in particular, had quoted sources as saying Ukraine would be hit by a “massive missile blitz” and invaded by some 200,000 troops, sharing the claim on social media alongside dramatic footage of Russian tanks, artillery, and warships on manoeuvres — but no such invasion materialised.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky did at one point appear to confirm that “[w]e are told that February 16 will be the day of the attack” in a statement seized upon by several Western media outlets, but a spokesman for the former comedian later clarified that he was simply making an “ironic” reference to the “date that was spread by the media”.
President Zelensky has previously urged American and British officials to tone down their rhetoric concerning a supposedly imminent Russian invasion, noting that, in his view, Ukraine has already been invaded with the annexation of Crimea following the Euromaidan coup of 2014, and warning that baseless talk of escalation will only create “panic” and damage the Ukrainian economy.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Vadym Prystaiko, echoed Zelensky’s sentiments after British defence secretary Ben Wallace suggested that efforts to solve the Ukrainian crisis through diplomatic means had “the whiff of Munich” about them.
Such comparisons to pre-war efforts to appease National Socialist Germany, the ambassador said, would needlessly “offend our partners in the world” and added that there was “panic everywhere not just in people’s minds but in financial markets… hurting the Ukrainian economy on sort of the same level as people leaving the embassy”.
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