RIA Novosti, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, REN TV and other Russian media have reported that Poland is sending its military to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine, allegedly to prepare and train them before further occupation of the western part of Ukraine. The propagandists received such an “insider” from “US intelligence officer” Scott Ritter from his interview with the Judging Freedom YouTube channel.
“According to Ritter, the Polish troops have no experience in conducting military operations, so now they are actually sending their fighters to the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in order to train and train them to fight.
Thus, Poland has sent tens of thousands of soldiers who are fighting in Ukrainian uniforms on the side of the Kyiv regime. When the time comes, these troops will be sent to the west of Ukraine, they won’t even have to cross the border, the officer said.”
But Ritter was a US intelligence officer for a very long time – in the 1980s and early 90s, during the Gulf War. After that, he managed to work as a UN arms inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and was the subject of an FBI investigation on charges of spying for Israel and the USSR – his marriage to Marina Khatiashvili, a former Soviet Georgian translator, aroused suspicion, in particular. In 1998, Ritter resigned, disappointed and accusing the White House of being too soft on the disarmament of Iraq. A year later, however, he changed his point of view to the opposite – he began to say that Iraq no longer poses a military threat, and to criticize the US authorities for too harsh sanctions against this country.
In June 2001, Ritter was charged with attempting to arrange a meeting with an undercover police officer posing as a 16-year-old girl. The charge was dropped and the case closed after a six-month probationary period. However, in November 2009, he was again detained for communicating with a police bait, whom he met in an Internet chat. Police said he exposed himself via webcam after the officer repeatedly introduced himself as a 15-year-old girl. He was charged with "unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of means of communication, corrupting a minor, indecent exposure, possession of the instrument of crime, attempted crime and incitement to criminal liability." Ritter turned down a plea deal and was found guilty of all but "attempted crime" in April 2011. He was sent to prison in March 2012 and released on parole in September 2014.
Since 2019, Ritter has been a regular contributor to the pro-Kremlin TV channel RT. And after the tragedy in Bucha, he began to make numerous “revelations”, accusing Ukraine of “crimes against humanity” and calling Biden a “war criminal” for “trying to shift the blame for the killings in Bucha” to Russia (for which he was banned from Twitter). In July 2022, Ritter was included in the list of pro-Russian propagandists compiled by the Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation.
It should be noted that recently Russian propagandists have been actively spreading fakes that Poland is allegedly preparing to annex the territories of western Ukraine. Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation Sergey Naryshkin also spoke about this at the end of November – however, he did not provide any evidence, except for a fake document on the preparation of referendums in western Ukraine, which has already been refuted by the Polish Foreign Ministry.