Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 04/07/2022
Velibor Vukasinovic, former director of JAT, has long been known for spreading various “conspiracy” narratives. In his last guest appearance on the show “Interview” (“Intervju”), on the YouTube channel Balkan info, he made a series of incorrect claims about the war in Ukraine, which are mostly part of Russian propaganda that tries to justify the Russian invasion of this country.
The video of the show “Interview”, in which Velibor Vukasinovic, former director of JAT, was a guest, was published on May 31, 2022, on the YouTube channel Balkan info.
In this show, which focuses on the Russian-Ukrainian war, Vukasinovic makes a number of incorrect claims and promotes various incorrect narratives, the sources of which are mainly Russian officials and institutions and which have already been refuted many times before.
Who is Velibor Vukasinovic?
Velibor Vukasinovic is mainly presented by the media as the former director of JAT, the former national airline of Yugoslavia, which was renamed and rebranded as Air Serbia in October 2013. According to Istinomer, Vukasinovic spent five months in the position of general director of this company. At that time, he was a frequent interlocutor of many media about the state of this airline.
A few years later, he came to the media spotlight again. Thus, in 2017, in the show “Bez cenzure”, he spoke, among other things, about “chemtrails”, which was the narrative that provided him with some later media appearances. With the advent of the pandemic, Vukasinovic also made incorrect claims about the Covid-19 infection, which Raskrinkavanje dealt with in the analysis published on December 25, 2020.
Vukasinovic is a frequent interlocutor of various shows on the YouTube channel Balkan info. From January of this year until the time of writing this analysis, he was a guest six times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and in recent shows, he also spoke about the Russian-Ukrainian war.
In the beginning, he states that Ukrainians and Russians are the same people and claims that “about 20 hours were left before Ukraine attacked Russia” and that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a “precautionary attack”:
… Things here will most certainly be resolved by a peace conference, and not an international one, but given that they are practically the same people, they will agree among themselves how it will work, excluding, of course, all those who have been preparing them for this attack for years. In fact, Ukraine was only about 20 hours away from attacking Russia. This was a precautionary attack. According to me.
In the continuation of the interview, he downplayed the spread of sanctions aimed at Russia and equated NATO countries with the Third Reich and Nazism:
About 10 percent of the population, 12 percent of the countries, as far as I know, have imposed some sanctions, and these are the countries that are in NATO, and these are mainly the countries that formed the strike forces of the Third Reich, that is, Nazi Germany. They all fought under Stalingrad.
(…)
The labels do not change, the ideology does not change, and so on. The main symbols remain the same. As you can see, what is happening in Ukraine. Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia have swastikas on a red background, so that is, those are the marks of the Third Reich, so they are even the marks of the SS units, which shed a lot of blood throughout Europe. Nothing changes, the Nazi origin of all this.
After that, he also touched on alleged chemical and biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and accused this country of planning a “biological-chemical attack” on Russia:
A world war cannot be fought with atomic means because we will all be destroyed in all of this, but chemical and biological are allowed. And these 30 or so laboratories were found, starting with this number one laboratory in Azovstal. When they are all driven out, it will be seen who is inside, the Canadian general has already been driven out, it will be seen who is inside, which scientists participated in all this and why Azovstal was a central laboratory, practically next to the border of Russia. But a biological chemical attack on Russia is ready, I am convinced of that.
In the following, he returned to the existence of the alleged plan of the Ukrainian attack on Russia, which he claims should have been implemented on February 25:
… and after all, the plans of the Ukrainian attack on the Russian Federation, which was planned for February 25, will be revealed
(…)
Again, it was a surprise for me because I had no information about the fact that these Ukrainians were planning an attack, and not even complete information, because our media did not say what level of Nazification had been reached in Ukraine. We only discovered that through all this now.
(…)
… the moment that army crossed into Belarus, it was known that Ukraine was going to attack the Russian Federation. The Russian Federation forewarned.
Are Ukrainians and Russians the same people?
The narrative that identifies the Ukrainian and Russian people as the same has been around for a long time, and one of its biggest promoters is the first man of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
On the other hand, these allegations have been repeatedly denied by different sources. So in the article of the Deutsche Welle web portal, published on February 24, 2022, it says:
The story of the tensions between Russia and Ukraine is very long, it goes back to the Middle Ages. These two countries have common roots in the East Slavic state of Kievan Rus, and that is why Russian President Vladimir Putin today often and happily speaks of “one nation”. In reality, the paths of the two nations diverged during the past centuries, two cultures, two languages were born – quite related, but still different.
And from the BBC’s article on Ukraine and its relationship with Russia, which was published on March 2, 2022, it is also clear that these are two different people.
EXACT QUOTE: Recently, Vladimir Putin announced that Russians and Ukrainians are one nation. However, experts disagree. They say that both people originate from the same country, but the history of Ukrainians has been different in the last nine centuries.
Was Ukraine planning an attack on Russia?
The stories about Ukraine’s alleged plan to attack Russia, which Vukasinovic talked about in the show “Interview”, originate from April 2022. Then the Russian Ministry of Defense published documents allegedly found in Ukraine by Russian soldiers, which, according to their claims, represent “proof” that the Ukrainian government was planning an offensive on the Donbas just before Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.
And these claims were denied by various sources shortly after they appeared. Raskrinkavanje wrote about this topic in an analysis from April 20, 2022. Then it was concluded that the documents do not represent evidence that Ukraine planned an offensive and that they do not say what Russian sources claim. Read more about this topic and what the documents actually show in our analysis available on this link.
From this, it is clear that there is no evidence that Russia attacked Ukraine as a precaution nor that Ukraine planned an attack on Russia.
Who introduced the sanctions against Russia?
In the interview, Vukasinovic claims that only 12 percent of countries have imposed sanctions on Russia, which he states are mostly countries that are in NATO.
The NATO alliance has 30 member countries, and according to the data of the web portal Castellum.Al, on the day of publication of this analysis, 46 countries imposed sanctions on Russia. However, in this report, Greenland, which normally belongs to the Danish kingdom, is counted as an independent country.
According to Reuters’ data, the number of countries that imposed sanctions on Russia on the day of publication of this analysis is 45 because, in this list, Greenland is treated as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, that is, the European Union.
So, if we consider Greenland as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, then, according to the data from the two mentioned sources, 45 countries have imposed sanctions on Russia. The base of the Castellum.Al website has a total of 201 countries, while the UN, for example, has 193 member countries.
If we take the number of UN members as the total number of countries, in that case, 45 countries that have imposed sanctions, out of a total of 193 countries, amounts to 23.31%. If we take the number from the Castellum’s database as the total number of countries, in that case, 45 out of 201 is 22.38%. In both cases, it is much more than 12 percent of the countries that imposed sanctions on Russia, as claimed by Vukasinovic.
On the other hand, in the article of the Economist intelligence web portal, published on March 30, 2022, it is stated that 36 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that have condemned the Russian attack on Ukraine.
We found that 36% of the world’s population lives in countries that have actively condemned Russia and imposed sanctions on the Russian economy. Led by the US and the EU, this bloc includes all pro-Western governments such as Japan, Australia, Canada, the UK, South Korea and (although to a lesser extent) Israel. Traditionally neutral countries, such as Switzerland, Finland and Sweden, also joined the ranks of this Western front.
(…)
Meanwhile, almost one-third of the world’s population lives in a country that has been neutral until now.
(…)
Finally, another 32% of the world’s population lives in a country where the government supports Russia’s actions.
So, it is not true that only 12 percent of countries, that is, “about 10 percent of the population”, condemned the Russian invasion and imposed sanctions on Russia.
Accusations of Nazism
Vukasinovic claims that in “Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, there are swastikas on a red background”, which, in his opinion, represents the symbols of the Third Reich and SS units and proves that Nazi ideology is present in NATO countries.
Although it is not clear whether he was referring to official state symbols such as flags and coats of arms, it is important to note that, for example, the flag of Lithuania does not have any symbols but three colors arranged horizontally. The coat of arms of Lithuania has a red color in the background, but it also does not contain the “swastika” feature. The flag of Estonia has no red color at all, while the coat of arms of Estonia also does not have the “swastika” feature. There is no swastika symbol on the flag or coat of arms of Latvia. So, none of the features of the countries that Vukasinovic is talking about have the symbols of the Third Reich and SS units on them, just as Ukraine does not have them either – neither on the flag nor on the coat of arms.
In this part of the interview, Vukasinovic represents and promotes the widespread narrative about the denazification of Ukraine, which Putin himself presented as the reason and justification for the Russian invasion of this country. Many experts and sources have already dealt with this topic, and in one of the earlier analyzes of Raskrinkavanje, from April this year, which you can find available on this link, read more about this narrative and why it has no basis in facts.
Laboratories, biological weapons, chemical attacks…
For years, incorrect claims about American and other biolaboratories in Ukraine, as well as alleged Ukrainian plans for biological and chemical attacks on Russia, have been spreading. At the height of the war in this country, some sources even claim that biolaboratories are the real target of the Russian attack.
The conspiracy theory about the existence of American or any other biolaboratories in Ukraine is “proved” by different, completely incorrect arguments. Numerous fact-checking web portals dealt with this topic, and these allegations were also written about in Raskrinkavanje’s analysis, which you can find on this link, and which explains in detail what is incorrect about this narrative.
As for the claim about the existence of a “central” laboratory in Azovstal, it has also appeared before. The web portal Raskrinkavanje.me from Montenegro also wrote about the fact that it is not true that there are laboratories for biological weapons under the Azovstal steel plant.
Vukasinovic also claims that “the Canadian general has already been expelled” from one such laboratory, which is another of the claims that fact-checking experts have previously assessed as incorrect. On this link, read the text written by Raskrinkavanje on why it is incorrect that the Canadian general who allegedly managed the biolaboratories was arrested while escaping from Azovstal.
According to the stated facts, the claims that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, that Ukraine planned an attack on Russia and that the Russian attack was a precaution, that 12 percent of countries, i.e., 10 percent of the population, imposed sanctions on Russia, that the features of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia have a swastika on a red background, that Azovstal is a biological laboratory and that Ukraine planned a biological-chemical attack on Russia, as well as that “the Canadian general has already been expelled” from the biological laboratory, are rated fake news and a conspiracy theory.