Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 18/03/2022
After the Russian attack on the military complex in Yavoriv, some media claimed that Russia attacked NATO and targeted the “NATO center” or “base”. None of this is true.
On March 13, the website Pravda published an article about Russia’s attack on a military training ground in the town of Yavoriv in Ukraine. The article is entitled:
RUSSIANS ATTACK NATO: Destroyed training base for Ukrainian Nazis – 35 dead (VIDEO)
According to the article, NATO’s instructors used this base to allegedly train “neo-Nazis” from the Ukrainian battalions Aidar and Azov.
The training ground for members of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian battalions Aidar and Azov was attacked with 30 Russian cruise missiles. The training ground is in Yavoriv, where neo-Nazis were trained by NATO instructors.
The claim that a NATO alliance facility was shelled in Yavoriv was also published in articles on several other websites in the region. On March 13, 2022, the website Kurir published two articles, claiming that Russia had attacked the “NATO center” in the headlines.
However, the articles do not state that it is a “NATO center”, but claim that the facility was attacked, which according to Russian intelligence, is used for training Ukrainian National Guard forces, and since the war began, it is used for training in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons that this country received from NATO members and other countries.
Some websites, starting with the website Klix, claimed that these were “NATO bases”. Thus, in Klix’s article from March 14, 2022, and the articles of fifteen other media, it is stated the following:
The shelling of the base near the Ukrainian-Polish border is Russia’s first direct attack on areas closer to NATO. Apart from the fact that the missiles were fired not far from the member of the Alliance, the Russian threat is also reflected in the fact that NATO bases were destroyed.
What are the facts?
On March 13, 2022, in the early morning hours, Russia shelled the military complex in the town of Yavoriv. This place, situated in the Lviv region, is located in western Ukraine, near the border with Poland. According to currently available information, 35 people were killed in the attack, while at least 130 were injured.
According to the New York Times article from March 13, 2022, the Yavoriv complex, which was shelled by Russia, houses the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, where troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, Latvia and other Western allies trained Ukrainian forces, starting in the 1990s.
A series of military exercises within the Partnership for Peace (PfP) between the NATO alliance and Ukraine were held at this training center. At the presentation of the training center in Yavoriv, published on the official website of the NATO alliance, this center was marked as a “Ukrainian training center”.
According to the Global Security website, an independent and non-profit source of security information, a military exercise called The Peace Shield has been held in Ukraine on several occasions as part of US-Ukrainian defense cooperation within NATO’s program Partnership for Peace. A series of these exercises were held in Yavoriv. The exercises were primarily aimed at training members of the Ukrainian army to operate within peacekeeping missions.
A website with official information on the International Center for Peace and Security was not available at the time of writing. The Wayback Machine archiving tool has automatically saved this domain multiple times, but only its homepage can be seen from the archive. This page indicates that information about the Center was available on the official website of the Ukrainian National Military Academy Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi, within the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
According to the announcements on the official website of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, exercises and training of the Ukrainian army (1, 2, 3) have been held in this center for years, but the Ukrainian army also trained members of military forces of other countries, such as Estonia and Finland.
According to an article in The New York Times, this center was “a key link between Ukraine’s armed forces and Western armies before the war – and has become an important logistics and training center for foreign fighters since the beginning of the Russian invasion”. A Ukrainian military official told Reuters that the Yavoriv center played a central role in admitting foreign volunteer fighters into the Ukrainian army.
Thus, the center in Yavoriv served to train members of the Ukrainian army, and since the beginning of the Russian invasion, it has also served to accept and redirect some of the foreign volunteers who came to Ukraine to fight against Russia.
It is a center where instructors from NATO countries trained in the years before the Russian invasion, but the center is Ukrainian, not owned by the Alliance.
We have not been able to establish the validity of the claim that members of the Aidar and Azov Battalions were part of training at the International Center for Peace and Security, as there is no publicly available information on this. However, as can be concluded from the article published on the website Pravda, this complex did not serve to train “members of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian battalions Aidar and Azov”. It trained the Ukrainian army and members of the army of other countries. While these battalions are part of it, the Yavoriv complex was used to train the army as a whole and occasionally soldiers from other countries.
Who was killed in the Russian missile attack?
After the attack on Yavoriv, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that “180 foreign mercenaries” had been killed. There is no independent confirmation for this, and official reports state that 35 people died and at least 130 were injured in Yavoriv.
According to Reuters, when asked if there were any Alliance personnel in the shelled complex, a NATO official said that “there are no NATO personnel in Ukraine”. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed to the Washington Post on March 13, 2022, that “no American soldiers were killed in the attack”.
We assess the claims that the “Russians attacked NATO”, “NATO center”, “NATO base” or “training base for Ukrainian Nazis” as fake news. Other publications of the same claims receive the rating for the distribution of fake news.
We give a clickbait rating to those websites’ articles that claimed that the “NATO center” was shelled only in the headlines, not in the text itself.
