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Ukrainian officials won’t confirm or deny that they’re responsible for this, and it’s impossible to tell from the clips of the attack whose helicopters were involved. But there are only two relevant questions to solving the mystery:

1. Was the footage truly recorded in the Russian city of Belgorod or does it capture one of Russia’s many attacks inside Ukraine?
2. If it’s from Belgorod, could the Russians have staged a false-flag attack on their own fuel depot?

The answer to the first question is already clear. It’s Belgorod.

The answer to the second is more complicated. Do we think the Russians would have done … this to themselves?

Anything’s possible. Putin might be looking for a pretext to abandon peace negotiations with Ukraine, or to justify a mass mobilization of military-age Russian men for a second offensive. But I’ll double down on the point I made a few days ago after *another* mysterious explosion in Belgorod, which is within 20 miles of the Ukrainian border. If the Kremlin were willing to stage a false-flag operation to galvanize Russian sentiment against Ukraine, it wouldn’t stick to valid military targets like fuel depots or armories. And it wouldn’t confine the attacks to a little-known border town like Belgorod. It would blow up an apartment building in Moscow or St. Petersburg, slaughtering civilians, and attribute the attack to Ukrainian “Nazis.”

That M.O. has worked for Putin before, after all.

Also, if Russia were going to blow something up in a false-flag attack, it certainly wouldn’t use military helicopters to do it. Phillips O’Brien knows why:

“We can’t protect our own territory from basic air attacks by a supposedly puny non-state on our border” isn’t the stuff of which great propaganda plays are made. And given Russia’s logistical problems, it’s bizarre to think of them wasting perfectly good fuel that’s already been transported to the border, ready to supply Russian vehicles near Kharkiv and the Donbas, instead of choosing some less valuable target for their provocation.

Occam’s Razor: The videos are exactly what they look like. The Ukrainians attacked the Belgorod fuel depot to starve Russian troops near the border of fuel, and probably attacked that weapons depot in the city a few days ago to starve them of weapons. It’s a huge propaganda win too at a moment when Russia is already withdrawing from areas in the north like Kiev and Chernihiv. That’s not a “redeployment,” Ukraine seems to be signaling with last night’s attack. “We chased them out with our counteroffensive, which now extends all the way into Russia.”

The only other semi-realistic possibility is that those are Russian helicopters in the videos and they attacked the fuel depot — not as part of a false flag but as an act of mutiny against the war. Which, frankly, would be worse news for Putin than a successful Ukrainian attack would be.

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