In his at times slightly wordy but overall devastating critique of corporate media, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky notes that one technique by which the corporate media manufactures false narratives is simply by choosing to omit certain media stories. I thought of this when I came across this story in the Guardian by Pjotr Sauer. [1] This is an emotive story about how Russian secret services allegedly recruited a Ukrainian in Bucha, scene of alleged Russian war crimes, (whose timing was perfectly situated to sink the Istanbul talks), to plant a bomb.
I am ready to believe the specific story about a Ukrainian man being recruited on Telegram to plant a bomb and willing to believe the general thesis that Russian secret services are recruiting Ukrainians online to carry out acts of sabotage. However; I am also willing to believe – and indeed know – that Ukrainian secret services are doing much the same. There have been a number of well-publicised cases of Russians having been recruited to plant bombs in Russia, targetting high-profile figures. Less well publicised but still visible in the Western media, are cases where teenagers are being recruited to carry out acts of sabotage. [2] I first noticed this when in my VK feed, (Russian social media), I kept seeing posters aimed at teenagers warning them not to accept money from strangers online to carry out acts of sabotage. I assume these reflect a real threat. * Initially, there was a propaganda ploy to try to present the sabotage operations in Russia as having been carried out by “Russian opposition groups” and “home-grown guerilla groups’, [3]. That ploy has largely been dropped; there is little/no supporting evidence, and it does not sit well with the other narrative lines about Putin’s repressive dictatorship. (You can’t have both a chaotic state of home-grown anarchy and a ruthless and efficient machine of repression).
The trick is simply to tell one side of the story. By only telling one side, Russia recruits people in Ukraine for sabotage operations, but not the other, that Ukraine recruits Russian teenagers for sabotage attacks, (no sign of the much vaunted “balance” here), you can create a completely false impression, whip up feelings, and, in this case, justify prolonging the war. This is what Pjotr Sauer is doing.
* Ukraine is having to issue the same kind of warnings: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/world/europe/ukraine-russia-teenagers-sabotage.html
Notes
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/russia-bucha-occupation-recruitment-bohdan-tymchenko-acts-of-sabotage-bucha
- For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/31/world/europe/ukraine-russia-train-sabotage.html “As conventional forces struggle to break through defensive lines, both sides are increasingly turning to guerrilla tactics.” or https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/opinion/russia-ukraine-sabotage-teens.html : “At dawn on May 8, 2023, a 17-year-old Russian teenager named Pavel Solovyov climbed through a hole in the fence of an aircraft plant in Novosibirsk, Russia. He and two friends were looking for a warplane that could be set on fire. An anonymous Telegram account had promised them one million rubles, around $12,500, to do so — a surreal amount of money for the boys.” and “This is far from an isolated incident. Small-scale attacks like it are part of a new kind of hybrid warfare being carried out by Russia and Ukraine.”
- https://thenewobserver.co.uk/one-mans-partisan-operations-is-anothers-state-terrorism/