CNN’s Belarusian “Bombshell” Report Is Just Another Damp Squib

The entire piece could have been condensed into several paragraphs at most instead of misportraying this damp squid as some kind of bombshell by making it a frontpage feature running several thousand words. Finite resources in funding and personnel were therefore expended to produce this redundant information warfare product, which speaks to the ulterior motives behind it.

CNN published a lengthy report on Tuesday about the Belarusian hospitals that treated wounded Russian soldiers during the opening stages of the special operation, dramatically presenting its findings as some kind of bombshell that would supposedly blow the lid off an inconvenient fact that Moscow had supposedly tried to keep hidden. This latest information warfare provocation fell flat, however, after that outlet retained a semblance of journalistic integrity by citing President Lukashenko’s earlier acknowledgements that these hospitals do indeed exist and thus aren’t any kind of secret.

The entire piece is therefore bizarre because much fewer words would have been written to simply convey the fact that a “dissident” doctor accused of corruption and receiving bribes had fled to Lithuania with a USB full of photographed x-rays of the Russian military patients that he treated. It therefore seems as though this top US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) outlet had ulterior motives in falsely portraying its latest report as some kind of bombshell, which is very strongly implied in the text itself.

A particular passage reads that “Unpicking the role that Belarus has played in the Ukraine war has taken on new urgency since Lukashenko announced in October that Russian soldiers would deploy to the country to form a new, ‘regional grouping’ and carry out joint exercises with Belarusian troops, raising fears that he might draw the country more directly into the conflict.” From this, it becomes obvious that CNN is just trying to play its part in reviving the long-running but previously much more intense information warfare campaign against that member of the Russian-led Union State.

To that end, they took what could have otherwise been a story worth just a few paragraphs at most and expanded it into a frontpage feature running several thousand words long in order to manipulate their targeted Western audience’s perceptions. Evidence of this intent is everywhere in the piece, especially since the vast majority of it is just mudslinging against President Lukashenko. When they’re not smearing the Belarusian leader, the authors are doing their utmost to make it seem like Russia went to great lengths to conceal the fact that its troops were being treated in that allied country’s hospitals.

All of this is meant to imbue the reader with a sense of conspiracy and dread, the first with respect to the alleged coverup that CNN pretended to have exposed despite admitting that President Lukashenko himself publicly acknowledged the existence of these hospitals while the second was conveyed through a combination of presenting Belarus as a police state and implying that Russia treats its wounded troops inhumanely. These weaponized narratives are intended to further erode Moscow’s soft power among that outlet’s targeted Western audience, but a lot of work went into something that’s so redundant.

The average CNN reader presumably already hates Russia and any country like Belarus that’s connected to it. This leading MSM outlet therefore didn’t have to go to such lengths to artificially manufacture their latest information warfare provocation, yet its editors still went through with it regardless. More than likely, the supplementary motive behind this was to draw attention to the Lithuanian-based Belarusian dissident network that’s reported to have helped the corrupt doctor flee from justice, which can in turn be used by them to get more funding from their Western patrons.

After all, as was already explained, the entire piece could have been condensed into several paragraphs at most instead of misportraying this damp squid as some kind of bombshell by making it a frontpage feature running several thousand words. Finite resources in funding and personnel were therefore expended to produce this redundant information warfare product, which speaks to the ulterior motives behind it that might even go as far as CNN having been ordered by elements of American intelligence to carry out this provocation. Objectively speaking, CNN could have done a lot better than they did.