Ukraine's security services are plotting a provocation in the southwestern port city of Odessa to accuse the Russian military of deliberate attacks against civilian targets, National Defence Control Center chief Mikhail Mizintsev has announced.
"In the area of the Odessa port of Yuzhnyi, the Ukrainian security services are planning a provocation using toxic chemicals to accuse Russian forces of striking civilian infrastructure. The most likely scenario for the fake is an immitation of a Russian missile strike against the Ukrainian Navy's Western Naval Base, resulting in the destruction of the port's cold storage plant, located 500 meters from the military facility," Mizintsev said in a briefing Saturday.
The officer specified that a 10 tonne tank of ammonia was delivered to the Odessa port on 18 April, with law enforcement and the security services issued with personal protective equipment.
According to Mizintsev, multiple international organizations, including the Romanian branch of the Red Cross, have suspended the delivery of humanitarian aid to Ukraine through Odessa due to large-scale theft of food and medical supplies by officials from the military administrations of the city and the region of Odessa.
The officer also reported that some 76 vessels from 18 countries remain trapped in Ukraine's ports thanks to the threat of shelling and the widespread deployment of mines in the country's internal waters.
The Russian military has established an 80 nautical mile-long, three nautical mile-wide humanitarian corridor through which commercial vessels can safely operate, broadcasting information on the corridor every 15 minutes via VHF frequencies in English and Russian, with the strip itself operational between 8 am and 7 pm daily. However, "the authorities in Kiev continue to evade interaction with the representatives of states and ship-owning companies to resolve the issue of the safe exit of foreign ships to the [corridor's] assembly area," Mizintsev said.
MoD spokesman Igor Konashenkov reported earlier in the day Saturday that Russian aircraft had disabled a logistics terminal at a military airfield outside Odessa "where a large batch of foreign weapons received from the US and European countries was being stored."
The Russian military has been forced to issue regular reports citing intelligence on potential provocations and false flags by Ukrainian forces and their Western backers amid a bevy of accusations by Kiev and NATO of Russian 'war crimes', which the MoD has dismissed as baseless. Earlier Saturday, the Russian military accused the US of helping Kiev to plot a series of false flag attacks involving chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons, citing a range of intelligence information related to these suspected plots.