The Russian news site Izvestia reports that during the “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” propaganda program on the Rossiya 1 TV channel on Wednesday July 10, the former Verkhovna Rada deputy Spiridon Kilinkarov gave an outrageous opinion on what he said was the reality surrounding the July 8 missile attack on the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv.

Kilinkarov suggested that not only was the accusation that Russia had targeted the hospital untrue he went on to imply it was a provocation engineered by Ukraine, the British or one of its other allies.

He said, “I’ll be honest – I expected something like this. But I didn’t think that we would be talking about a children’s hospital.”

He went on to say: “Let us assume that without exception, all the missiles that flew towards the city of Kyiv [on Monday] were shot down by Ukrainian air defense. Tell me, what will [President Volodymyr] Zelensky go to the NATO summit with then?” He suggested that Ukraine’s requests for more air defenses would be dismissed.

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He then asked if the attack on the hospital was not carried out by Russia, then who? He dismissed the idea of a “Ukrainian sitting at some kind of system and pressing a button, that would cause a missile to fly, say, to Ohmatdyt.”

But he opined that it was more likely to have been carried out by any number of “geopolitical players there who play their own games,” then saying it was the sort of thing that Britain would do.

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Russia’s deputy foreign minister said that Ukraine’s “peace formula” is a “dead-end” and complained about the deliberate “ignoring of other initiatives” to end the war in Ukraine.

Kilinkarov then implied that blaming Russia for the attack gave Ukraine and others the excuse they needed to bring it to the UN Security Council and the NATO summit to increase the support NATO and its allies would provide to Kyiv.

He dismissed the photographic evidence produced by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) of the fragments recovered from the hospital and the analysis of video footage of the strike analyzed by the Bellingcat investigative website that categorically confirmed that it was a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile had hit the hospital. He suggested that anyone could produce the tail or bits from a missile.

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Kilinkarov was a pro-Russian Verkhovna Rada deputy (representative) from 2006 to 2014 and a member of the Communist Party of Ukraine. After the Revolution of Dignity forced former pro-Russian Ukrainian Viktor Yanukovych to flee to exile in Russia in 2014, Kilinkarov followed him there. Since then, he has lived in Russia and has been working as an analyst for Kremlin state media.

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