MOSCOW, January 23. /TASS/. The West is seeking to prepare information space for a series of large-scale provocation, including military ones, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday.
"[Information space] is being prepared, probably, for a range of large-scale provocations and public opinion is being prepared for that. It is very important for the collective West, for NATO, for Britons and Americans to create a corresponding information realm. They cannot act without it," she said in an interview with the Rossiya-1 television channel.
"Why are they doing that? What for? We don’t rule out large-scale information manipulations and provocations in future. We don’t rule out military provocations either," she said.
According to Zakharova, a series of fakes have already been spread via traditional mass media, not at the level of social networks. "Let us remember an article in the New York Times about the alleged evacuation of the Russian embassy in Ukraine. Let us remember a recent Bloomberg publication (that China’s leader had allegedly asked Russia not to invade Ukraine during the Olympic Games - TASS), which was refuted by both the Russian foreign ministry and China’s foreign ministry and the Chinese embassy said it yesterday," Zakharova said, adding that another example is the British Foreign Office’s fake about Russia’s alleged plans to change government in Ukraine.
The UK Foreign Office said earlier that Russia’s government is seeking to install a pro-Russian government in Ukraine, with former member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (parliament) Yevgeny Murayev as its head.
Commenting on this statement, the Russian foreign ministry called on the British colleagues to stop indulging in provocations.