Russian mass media report that the car of the Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces was set on fire by a pensioner who was kidnapped and hypnotized by the Ukrainian special services.

“The woman who set fire to the official BMW was a 65-year-old pensioner named Olena,” the online newspaper “Lenta” also reports with reference to the arson of the car of General Yevhen Secretarev. The news site also published a video of the car being set on fire.

“Her son-in-law believes she was recruited by Ukrainian special forces, who trained her to set fire to cars,” added reporters for Lenta, an online newspaper once known as one of Moscow’s independent channels.

But Lenta has taken an increasingly pro-Kremlin stance in recent years, eventually being bought in 2020 by Russia’s largest state-owned bank, Sberbank.

Baza, another Russian news site, said the woman’s gesture was confirmed as a protest against a “special military operation” launched by President Vladimir Putin on February 24, and that the woman faces up to 15 years in prison.

The General Secretary heads the Department of Military Censorship in the Russian Armed Forces.

The news presented by the Russian mass media was called “madness”

The Insider, an investigative website that works with Bellingcat journalists, alleged in a wide-ranging investigation published earlier in August that numerous Russian soldiers and their relatives had complained to military prosecutors that the soldiers had been tricked or coerced into signing professional contracts by their superiors.

It is unclear whether the woman’s gesture is related to this situation and how reliable the information presented by the Kremlin-controlled Russian media is. Investigative sites The Insider and Bellingcat were banned in Russia in mid-July.

Olha Lautman, a researcher at the Center for the Analysis of European Politics, on her Twitter page, referring to the news of a pensioner allegedly “hypnotized” by the Ukrainian special services, notes that “not an hour goes by that they (Russians) do not reveal to the world the absurdity, cruelty and madness of this failed state.” .

Lautman is one of the foreign analysts who last week expressed doubts about the FSB’s official version of the murder of Daria Dugina, the daughter of one of President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent ideologues.

On Monday, the Federal Security Service of Russia, the FSB, announced that it had identified a second person involved in the murder of Oleksandr Dugin’s daughter.

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