DISINFO: Ukraine used grain corridors for drone strike on Russian ship
SUMMARY
The grain corridor was used as cover for the attack on Sevastopol.
Firstly, there are suspicions that Ukraine, using this corridor, was transporting explosives to blow up the Crimean bridge, and secondly, that the grain channel (and this has already been confirmed by our military experts) was used to move underwater and surface drones to strike at Sevastopol.
The drones that participated in the attack were launched from the Odessa area and used the security zone of the grain corridor. Thus, Kyiv disrupted the "grain deal".
RESPONSE
A pro-Kremlin disinformation aiming to deflect Russia’s responsibility for the growing food crisis and supply insecurity, justifying the Kremlin’s decision to suspend its participation in the Black Sea grain initiative.
This false allegation goes in line with a wider pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign aiming to blame Western countries for a global food crisis engineered by Russia as part of its unjustified aggression against Ukraine.
The claim that Ukraine used the humanitarian corridor created for grain exports to attack Sevastopol with drones is false. An official representative of the UN confirmed that on the night of October 29th, at the time of the attack, no ships were located in the humanitarian corridor. Russia accuses Ukraine of using the humanitarian corridor for drone attacks without providing any evidence. Read the full debunk of the story at Myth Detector.
Russia made the decision to suspend its participation in the deal after drone attacks on the Russian Black Sea Fleet's Sevastopol Headquarters. Still, just a few days later, Russia reversed its decision in what seemed to be a PR move to avoid international blame and the strong critique coming from the initiative’s two other main players: Ankara and the UN.
Moscow accused Ukraine of perpetrating terrorist attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with the help of the UK. However, the British Defense Ministry has officially denied any accusations of terrorism by stating that “To detract from their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defence is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale”. Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied it was behind the attacks. However, even if we accept the Kremlin’s version of events - namely that the drone strikes were orchestrated by Ukraine’s military intelligence - this does not change the fact that this purported attack would constitute not an act of terrorism, but lawful sabotage under international humanitarian law (IHL).
See other similar disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that Russia suspends its participation in the Black Sea grain initiative because of Ukraine’s terrorist attacks and EU breaches, that Ukrainian grain exports do not affect global prices, that Russia should not be accused of withdrawing from the Black Sea grain deal, that the EU, not Russia, is behind the energy, food and economic crisis, that the EU is causing a global food storage by keeping all the grain from Ukraine, or that the US and the EU don’t care about starving many millions of Latin Americans.