Russian Media Claims US Will "Send Troops" to Kyrgyzstan Over Air Crash: Disinformation

Why does the Russia media print stuff like this speculating that the US is about to go to war with Kyrgyzstan?!

If you ever wonder why Eurasian exchange students and new immigrants in America acquire the views they do, ponder the media they read all their lives, were satured with, and still read and believe -- it's filled with deliberate lies and tendentious bullshit endlessly inciting hatred and suspicion.

The Kremlin is the worst of the provocateurs in this business, and the old Soviet disinformation and "agents of influence" apparatus was never dismantled. (Yes, the Daily Mail with its fake story about Saudi reports of involvement in the Boston bombing is right up there with the disinformation, but in their case, it's about sensations to sell newspapers; in the Kremlin's case, it's a state policy to lie and distract.)

The way these pieces always work there is "plausible deniability" because the Russian outlet is always citing an "expert" from one of the many state-sponsored think-tanks, or even a "Western expert" from among their likeminded networks, or even "sources" close to the government.

Today, the Russian wire service regnum.ru, which seldom departs from the official Moscow line, has a story with the headline "Plane Crash: US May Declare Kyrgyzstan as 'Outlaw' and Bring in Forces:  Opinion," citing Kirill Stepanyuk, a commentator from comment.kg

Washington may declare Kyrgyzstan a country of a unrestrained terrorism and introduce US troops into the republic. We cannot forget that for the USA, Central Asia is a strategically important region and now there is the urgent issue of the withdrawl from Kyrgyzstan of the American military base, the same base from which the plane that crashed took off.

There is no basis for any of these claims.

According to the New York Times, the military plane crashed near the Kyrgyz village of Chaldovar on the border of Kazakhstan.

The Times published a picture of the crash site yesterday and quoted US officials as saying the reason for the crash and the status of the five crew members was still not known.

The Times cited an eyewitness who said that local authorities blocked off the site:

The news agency cited a local official, Daniyar Zhanykulov, a deputy head of a Kyrgyz political party, who said that the open parachute was on the ground near the site, but that police officers and firefighters found no sign of the crew.

“It’s a horror, what’s happening,” Mr. Zhanykulov said, according to the report. “There are no signs of people. The prosecutor and police blocked off the area. And the rubble of the plane is burning. This is a mountain area, and fire trucks cannot work.”

But according to the Russian "specialist" at comment.kg it was all different:

Really, in the first minutes after the plane crash, there was contradictory information with regard to the fact that at the site of the crash of the fuel plane, neither brigades from the Emergency Ministry nor police and even ambulances were allowed near the sight. Supposedly the territory was surrounded by American military." Whether that was true or not will hardly be able to be established since practically immediately followed a rebuttal of this information. If you reason logically, the Americans learned about trouble on board the fuel plane immediately and after they got an SOS signal likely sent their military people to the fallen liner.

Of course, it's possible US troops got to a plane that had just taken off from their base a few minutes earlier than local first-responders but I think more than just the American side of this story has to be questioned.

This crash follows a crash in Afghanistan in which 7 people on board a plane were killed after taking off from Bagram, and "no enemy activity" was reported in the area. Naturally, two planes like this crashing in the same week seems like sabotage, and yet, given the rush with which the US is trying to get troops out of Afghanistan and all the ensuing difficulties, fatigue and nerves and the negligence that comes with them could also be part of the background to these accidents. Or they could just be accidents.

I don't recall an American military plane ever crashing before in Kyrgyzstan, given the probably thousands of flights that have come out of that based during the Afghan war.  Kyrgyzstan is like other post-Soviet countries with quite a few plane crashes in its record, but this was a plane piloted by Americans from their base, presumably.

This Russian story is not above trying to fan the flames of in fact non-existent ethnic hatred toward Kyrgyz, merely because the Boston bombers happen to have been born in Kyrgyzstan, as Chechens in the diaspora, although they left more than 10 years ago. Kyrgyzstan appears to have little to do with the Tsarnaev family, other than the fact that Tamerlan Tsarnaev managed to hang on to a Kyrgyz passport and use it to travel to Dagestan undetected supposedly even by Dagestani officials - a story that I think needs more research and more explanation -- and those implying that questions and criticisms here are about the Kyrgyz ethnos should knock it off, as it's about the Kyrgyz government, often pressured by Russia, and that's about something different.

As eyewitnesses describe, the fuel plane began to disintegrate in mid-air and exploded at a height of about two kilomters. Kowing that the USA will contrive to draw some advantage even from terrorist attacks, even in this story some underwater rocks may suddenly appear. Not so long ago, after the explosions in Boston, in the USA the question began to be hyped at length athat the death-dealing "pressure cookers" were prepared by natives of Kyrgyzstan, the brothers Tsarnaev."

This is fake, as there isn't a single news story in the American press, even in tabloids that sensationalized the story like the Daily News, claiming these were "Kyrgyz" -- it was always explained even for the geography-challenged American public that these were Chechens who happened to be born in Kyrgyzstan and left. Kyrgyzstan has as much to do with this story as the Seven Eleven chain store where the bombing suspects bought their Doritos and Red Bull, breakfast of champions.

Stepanyuk went on to say that the Americans "most likely will not miss a chance" to claim that a missile downed the plane (although there is no such claim) and that they are "capable" of even "sacrificing a plane" for this purpose (and of course the people on it, which of course is an outrageous implication).

"Washington may declare Kyrgyzstan an outlaw country of unbridled terrorist and introduce their forces into the republic."

American troops are there already on the base, of course, but there's absolutely nothing like that implied by US officials or even intimated by the big critics of the US involvement in this region.

EurasiaNet is back to putting falcons on the front page in a week of plane crashes and suspects in the Boston bombing tied to this region, they've either run out of copy or they've decided that this sort of "costumes and colourful objects" folk approach to the region is just the sort of "human interest" their readers are looking for -- presumably because they don't get enough of it from National Geographic.

The Bug Pit doesn't advance any critiques or conspiracy theories in any direction but notes the mystery of the removed yet seemingly re-appearing parachutes.

Bug writes that the last crash of the KC-135 was in 1991 and fails to explain it wasn't in Kyrgyzstan, then links to Wikipedia, which actually says the last crash was in 1999 and in Germany.