Live updates: follow the latest news on Russia-Ukraine
Almost four weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Nato said it is concerned that Russia will use chemical weapons in a "false flag" attack.
Warnings about Russia's possible use of a false flag operation were sounded before the war even began – the term itself traces its origins back to the Second World War.
"We are concerned Moscow could stage a false flag operation in Ukraine, possibly with chemical weapons," Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday.
A pretext to attack
On February 17, a week before the invasion, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the United Nations Security Council that Russia had plans to manufacture a pretext for its attack on Ukraine.
This, he said, could be done through a false flag attack whereby one party, in this case Russia, would carry out an attack to make it look as if Ukraine was the perpetrator. The faked attack could give Russia the casus belli, or case for war against Ukraine.
Mr Blinken said this could come in the form of a "fabricated, so-called terrorist bombing inside Russia", or the discovery of a mass grave.
More alarmingly, he said, the false flag could come in the form of a very real chemical attack against Russian civilians.
Now, weeks after Russia moved militarily against Ukraine, Nato is making the same warnings.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said last week that such a move would be "straight out of the Russian playbook".
“They start saying that there are chemical weapons that are being stored by their opponents or by the Americans, so that when they themselves deploy chemical weapons – as I fear they may – they have a fake story ready to go," he said. Mr Johnson appears to have been referring to incidents in Syria where the Russians warned that Syrian rebel groups were about to use chemical weapons, only for Russia's Syrian allies to use them first in populated areas, killing thousands of civilians.
Origins
In 1939, Nazi operatives dressed as Polish soldiers stormed the German Gleiwitz radio tower on the border with Poland. In what was a classic false flag operation, the Nazis broadcast an anti-German message and even killed a farmer known for being a Polish sympathiser. German soldiers also shot Jewish political prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms in order to fake the scene of a clash.
This, with other incidents, set the scene for an attack on Poland that began the day after the Gleiwitz attack.
In Japan, eight years before Gleiwitz, Japanese military personnel detonated dynamite near a Japanese-owned railway line. The Imperial Japanese Army accused Chinese saboteurs of carrying out the deed. Shortly after, Japan invaded Manchuria, in response to the railway incident.
The term itself originates from the 16th century, when pirates flew flags of friendly nations to deceive their enemies, allowing them to approach closer than they would have otherwise done.
Russia-Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the separatist-held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, together known as Donbas, an independent region the night before he launched attacks on Ukraine.
But in the run-up to this fateful announcement, the Russian government broadcast a slew of media campaigns that painted Ukraine as planning for war.
Social media sleuths pored over the videos released and found several inconsistencies that discredited the Russian claims of Ukrainian aggression on Donbas.
A Twitter thread by Live Universal Awareness Map (Liveuamap), a global news and information site to track crises in real time, detailed numerous occasions of such false claims by the Russian government in the lead-up to February 24, the day of the invasion.
False flag operations by any side in the run-up to, or during war, could have momentous effects for decades to come and could influence the willingness of other countries to use similar methods of deception.
But any armies attempting to conduct false flag operations would be wise to consider international law. The Geneva Convention, which governs the conduct of armies in wartime, says that operations where one side pretends to be their adversary and thereby sows confusion are prohibited.
“It is prohibited to make use of the flags or military emblems, insignia or uniforms of adverse parties while engaging in attacks," the convention says. In a separate article, it says that this also applies to using the uniforms and symbols of "neutral or other states not parties to the conflict".
The convention says countries doing this may do so "to shield, favour, protect or impede military operations”.
