MOSCOW, February 10. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin said in an interview published on Thursday that the assessments of current global events by US special services, which are reported by the news media, are politicized and don’t reflect reality.
"As the evidence from practice shows, the assessments by US special services with regard to current events in the world, which are reported by the news media, are politicized," he said in the interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets. "They don’t reflect the reality."
He was referring to "some US intelligence data" that are being reported increasingly more often.
Naryshkin said last autumn "the arsenal of empty accusations started to run low" and doubts emerged among European nations whether Russia really "prepared to invade Ukraine."
"That was exactly when some top-secret intelligence came to light in the United States that Russia ‘may be preparing to attack Ukraine,’" he said. "They did not contain and do not contain any specific data."
The agency’s director recalled how, in February 2003, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed a special meeting of the UN Security Council, showing some "white powder as evidence that Iraq allegedly possesses weapons of mass destruction."
"That, as you know, was the reason for the US to start the aggression that ended with well-known tragic consequences for Iraq," Naryshkin said. "It led to the destabilization of the entire Middle East, the destruction of economies, chaos and the death of many innocent people."
"And in the spring of 2004, Powell admitted that in his report he relied on information from the CIA," the Russian official said. "That’s even as the sources of US intelligence turned out to be ‘inaccurate, incorrect, and in some cases deliberately misleading.’"
Even so, the white powder "served as a pretext for the US to violate the UN Charter and defy the norms of international law," Naryshkin went on to say.
He said the "ploy with reference to some intelligence data" is something that the US practices on a regular basis.
"Let’s remember Yugoslavia, the intervention in Libya in 2011 and in Syria in 2014," he said.
Most recently, the US "effectively fled" from Afghanistan as Afghans tried as much as they could to get onboard the departing flights, Naryshkin said. The reason is miscalculations by US intelligence that failed in estimating how robust the Ashraf Ghani regime was, the official said.