Latest news with #falseflag
Daily Mail
05-08-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Russia accuses UK of plotting 'false flag' to sink its ships
Russia is feared to be preparing false flag attacks on its shadow fleet of sea vessels in order to deter the West from further sanctioning them. According to reports from the SVR, Moscow's foreign intelligence service, is said to have claimed that the UK was plotting to attack the country's fleet of ships used to subvert sanctions. The SVR said that the attacks would be designed to look like accidents, causing significant environmental damage and allowing Britain and the rest of NATO to justify further actions against them. The Telegraph reported it claimed: 'British intelligence services are planning to use NATO allies to launch a mass raid on the "shadow fleet"; for this purpose, an ecological catastrophe in international waters is being prepared.' But experts said the report's publication raised concerns that Russia is preparing its own false flag operation, a scheme carried out by the Kremlin but designed to look like it has British origins. Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at RUSI, told the newspaper: 'One interpretation might be that the Russians are insuring themselves against something breaking down or sinking, in a way that creates a pretext for restricting [their movement across the ocean].' So far at least six tankers have suffered mysterious explosions since the start of the year. The suspicion has largely fallen on Ukraine, as all of the tankers were docked in Russian ports. Some of them were carrying Russian oil. It comes after the National Crime Agency (NCA) warned UK financial firms that Russian oil trading companies are utilising a complex network of companies with deliberately obscure ownership structures in order to evade sanctions. Britain has banned the maritime transportation of Russian oil as its energy exports are funding the war in Ukraine. In 2024, 30 per cent of Russia's federal budget came from oil and gas sales. But Russian oil trading companies are managing to circumvent sanctions to get Western cash which is continuing to fund the Russian state, investigators believe. One of the companies sanctioned last year used over 100 Shadow Fleet oil tankers, vessels which are usually over 15 years old which secretly carry Russian oil. To avoid detection, flags are regularly changed and the ship's automatic identification system is turned off to avoid its movements being tracked, while the oil is often transferred from one ship to another to obscure its origin before the shipment reaches its destination. Over 400 Shadow Fleet vessels have so far been sanctioned by the UK, EU, US and Canada. An NCA spokesman said: 'Today, the National Crime Agency has issued an alert to financial institutions and other members of the UK regulated sector in relation to the sale of Russian oil and gas through the use of Shadow Fleet vessels and front companies.' 'Sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of its invasion of Ukraine have had a significant impact on its ability to sell oil and gas it produces. However, in an effort to circumvent these controls, Russian oil trading companies are utilising a complex network of companies with deliberately obscure ownership structures to evade sanctions whilst accessing Western finance and professional services in order to continue to fund the Russian state.'
Daily Mail
05-08-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Fears Russia will sink its own ships in a 'false flag' and blame the West after the Kremlin accused Britain of preparing 'mass raids'
Russia is feared to be preparing false flag attacks on its shadow fleet of sea vessels in order to deter the West from further sanctioning them. According to the Telegraph, a report from the SVR, Moscow 's foreign intelligence service, claimed that the UK was plotting to attack Russia's fleet of ships used to subvert sanctions. The SVR said that the attacks would be designed to look like accidents, causing significant environmental damage and allowing the UK and the rest of NATO to justify further actions against them. The report claimed: 'British intelligence services are planning to use NATO allies to launch a mass raid on the "shadow fleet"; for this purpose, an ecological catastrophe in international waters is being prepared.' But experts said the report's publication raised concerns that Russia is preparing its own false flag operation, a scheme carried out by the Kremlin but designed to look like it has British origins. Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at RUSI, told the newspaper: 'One interpretation might be that the Russians are insuring themselves against something breaking down or sinking, in a way that creates a pretext for restricting [their movement across the ocean].' So far, at least six tankers have suffered mysterious explosions since the start of the year. The suspicion has largely fallen on Ukraine, as all of the tankers were docked in Russian ports. Some of them were carrying Russian oil. It comes after the National Crime Agency (NCA) warned UK financial firms that Russian oil trading companies are utilising a complex network of companies with deliberately obscure ownership structures in order to evade sanctions. Britain has banned the maritime transportation of Russian oil as its energy exports are funding the war in Ukraine. In 2024, 30 per cent of Russia's federal budget came from oil and gas sales. But Russian oil trading companies are managing to circumvent sanctions to get Western cash which is continuing to fund the Russian state, investigators believe. One of the companies sanctioned last year used over 100 Shadow Fleet oil tankers, vessels which are usually over 15 years old which secretly carry Russian oil. To avoid detection, flags are regularly changed and the ship's automatic identification system is turned off to avoid its movements being tracked, while the oil is often transferred from one ship to another to obscure its origin before the shipment reaches its destination. Over 400 Shadow Fleet vessels have so far been sanctioned by the UK, EU, US and Canada. An NCA spokesman said: 'Today, the National Crime Agency has issued an alert to financial institutions and other members of the UK regulated sector in relation to the sale of Russian oil and gas through the use of Shadow Fleet vessels and front companies. 'Sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of its invasion of Ukraine have had a significant impact on its ability to sell oil and gas it produces. 'However, in an effort to circumvent these controls, Russian oil trading companies are utilising a complex network of companies with deliberately obscure ownership structures to evade sanctions whilst accessing Western finance and professional services in order to continue to fund the Russian state.'
WIRED
22-07-2025
- Politics
- WIRED
Everything Is a ‘False Flag' Now
Jul 22, 2025 11:18 AM Conspiracy theories about so-called false flag attacks have been around for decades. But as trust in media and public institutions craters, every single major news event is now being labeled as fake. Photo-Illustration:As President Donald Trump struggles to contain the fallout related to his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, some of his own supporters have decided only one conspiracy theory could possibly explain what's going on. Welcome to the era of the 'false flag.' Almost every news development is now labeled a 'false flag,' or a distraction designed to deflect attention from the real story, by some conspiracy theorist online. 'All these floods popping up around the country is a false flag,' an anonymous X account which posts far-right content wrote on July 10. 'They want us to forget Epstein!' False flag conspiracy theories have been around for decades, long before the emergence of the internet—and like many conspiratorial prisms, they're rooted in something real, in this case the fact that militaries and intelligence services have staged attacks in order to give pretexts for war. But the volume of social media posts mentioning 'false flags' is now at an unprecedented high, according to new research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) shared exclusively with WIRED. Basically, according to the conspiratorial corners of the internet, everything is a false flag now. 'False flag attacks in the form of severe and unprecedented flooding are currently being carried out across the country as a diversion from Trump spiking the Epstein files,' Stew Peters, a podcaster with a long history of promoting antisemitism and conspiracy theories, wrote on X, alongside a video of actual flooding in North Carolina. 'I didn't need ChatGPT to tell me it was a false flag assassination,' RC DeWinter, an artist with 70,000 followers on X wrote on the anniversary of the Trump assassination attempt. 'Everything you are watching on TV is a false flag, especially the nonsense about Elon Musk & Trump spat,' another X user wrote last week, referencing the fallout between the president and the richest man in the world. Data from ISD shows that over the past five years, false flag claims have increased by more than 1100 percent on X, and the situation is getting increasingly worse. There were one million mentions of 'false flag' on X between April 26 and June 26, 2025, a nearly 350 percent increase compared to the prior two months. 'It's unprecedented in terms of the volume, the speed at which it spread and the level of engagement that we saw. Some of these accounts were not that big and yet they were garnering millions of views in a matter of hours,' Valeria de la Fuente Suárez, a digital research analyst with ISD and author of the research, tells WIRED. 'It's just becoming this common response to these high-profile crises when there's chaos and confusion and uncertainty and in many cases, it doesn't align with their agenda.' De la Fuente Suárez says the institute's research focused on X, but adds that she was also able to find many examples of 'false flag' conspiracizing on other platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. X, TikTok, and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment. False flag operations, which are carried out by governments or militaries in an effort to blame an adversary for something they did not actually do, have a rich history. In one of the most famous examples, German soldiers pretended that Polish troops had stormed across the Poland-Germany border in 1939 and taken over a German radio station. The next day, Germany invaded Poland—and Adolf Hitler referenced the previous day's fake attack in order to legitimize the incursion. But for as much as real false flag incidents have occurred, conspiracy theorists have used these histories as a way of legitimizing false flag conspiracy theories. Major incidents, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the September 11 attacks, and the Sandy Hook shooting, are framed by conspiracy theorists as 'false flags.' Today, after any major incident—whether it's the attempted assassination of Trump last year, the devastating Texas flooding, or the shooting of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman—people on the right and left now regularly respond by claiming they are simply distractions. 'Vance Boelter is not a real person,' one X account holder posted about the charged Minnesota shooter. 'This is a false flag psyop that the news media is using to instill fear into the people.' In her report, de la Fuente Suárez outlines a number of reasons why these conspiracy theories have flourished online, including the collapse in trust of mainstream media and public institutions, social media platforms abandoning fact checking, and the rise in popularity of so-called 'news influencers' like Peters. 'It creates the sense that nothing can be trusted, that all we read, we see, we hear, on TV, on the news, it's part of this deception,' de la Fuente Suárez says. 'But one of the things that concerns me the most is that within these frameworks, those that are harmed in these attacks are also dehumanized. They are depicted not as victims of attacks, but as these elements of a grand staged plan of deception, downplaying acts of violence and the suffering of the victims in it.' De la Fuente Suárez says that antisemitism is also driving false flag conspiracies to an unprecedented level. Antisemitic posts were among the main drivers of the most recent spike in false flag conspiracies on X. This began, she says, in response to the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers who were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC on May 21. Less than two weeks later, a man in Boulder, Colorado allegedly used incendiary devices to attack participants in a march held to support Israeli hostages in Gaza. 'False Flag 100%,' a conspiracy-focused X account posted two days after the DC shooting. The post was accompanied by a video of the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and has been viewed 3.6 million times to date. In the aftermath of the Boulder attack, an X account that describes its author as an 'anti-zionist Jew' posted an image of the suspected attacker with the caption: 'This man is an Israeli agent who has just perpetrated a false flag event in Boulder Colorado.' The post has been viewed over 2.2 millions times. 'Antisemitism is at the center of these conspiracy claims, so they resonate more, and in these moments, it's just an easy response and one that is, in many cases, very difficult to debunk,' says de la Fuente Suárez. Other experts see the rise in false flag conspiracy theories as a reflection of the increasingly fractured political environment. "The rise in 'false flag' conspiracy theories is closely tied to the political climate,' Pradeep Krishnan, an expert in conspiracy theory and communication at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, tells WIRED. 'The Trump presidency has mainstreamed conspiracist rhetoric to mobilise political distrust and promote anti-establishment sentiment.'
Wall Street Journal
19-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
By the Patriots' Stadium, Robert Kraft's Data Crunchers Track Antisemitism
FOXBOROUGH, Mass.—A day after an attacker in Boulder, Colo., aimed Molotov cocktails into a crowd of people advocating for Israel, Adam Katz watched the nation's real-time reaction roll across a giant monitor in his office. Floor-to-ceiling screens distilled patterns from social-media posts worldwide that flooded into computers at the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, where Katz is president. One graph caught his eye. It showed a rise in messages calling the attack a 'false flag' operation orchestrated by Jews to manipulate public opinion.
Reuters
31-05-2025
- General
- Reuters
Fact Check: Registration of Liverpool crash vehicle cited inaccurately on social media
Incorrect license plate details for the car driven into crowds of Liverpool soccer fans have been cited as evidence online to baselessly infer the May 26 incident was a 'false flag' attack. Almost 80 people were injured when the Ford Galaxy, opens new tab ploughed into a celebratory parade being held in the city centre for Liverpool's Premier League title victory. Merseyside Police later charged 53-year-old Liverpudlian Paul Doyle with seven offences including dangerous driving and two counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent. On social media, however, X and Facebook posts, opens new tab that claimed to have figured out the car's registration number said there was no record of it in the UK's vehicle database, which is maintained by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). The posts show a screenshot of a search on the DVLA file for 'DC18DPW' which returned zero results. 'The car that was involved in the Liverpool incident cannot be found,' said an X post, opens new tab, saying this was evidence the crash was a 'false flag' operation by Britain's spy agency, further calling it 'An attack on it's own people.' Reuters also searched the DVLA database for 'DC18DPW' and got the same result. However, this is not the correct registration number for the vehicle involved in the crash. The publicly available photos, opens new tab and videos, opens new tab that show the car and its plates are low quality or angled. However, the Metro newspaper, which published a witness video, opens new tab with a clear view of the car's rear plate and intentionally blurred it for publication, shared the unedited footage with Reuters via email. The unedited footage shows the registration number cited on social media is incorrect. A record for a grey Ford, the same make said by police to have ploughed into the crowd, appeared when Reuters searched the correct registration number in the DVLA database. Merseyside Police and the Home Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. DVLA declined to comment. False. The registration number said in social media posts to be on the Ford Galaxy's plate is incorrect. Reuters viewed the correct registration number in a clear video of the car that was supplied by a witness to Metro. The DVLA database has a record for a Ford vehicle under the correct registration number. This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work.
