A few days ago I wrote an article, differentiating false flags from fake flags: Warning: a “fake flag” was allegedly prepared by Ukraine in Nikolaev. Yesterday we had a textbook example of a fake flag in Ukraine in the form of a fire at the “Amstor” commercial centre. Zelensky immediately accused Russia of bombing a civilian target with 1000 shoppers inside. His words were dutifully parroted by BBC, which also showed some footage from the site.

Several visual facts immediately lead to questions: If there are 1000 shoppers inside, why is the parking lot in front of the mall empty, save for a couple of civilian cars, fire truck and some military personell? Where are all the victims, their relatives, ambulances? Where is the damage from an explosion – only a typical fire was shown? And as if this was not enough, people started digging up some interesting facts from Google.

First, a German reader in a comment to this post on Russell Bentley’s Telegram channel pointed out that the center is marked as “Permanently closed” by Google

Then AzMilitary1 Telegram channel posted a number of photos and also discovered that France 24 and The Guardian stuffed the news about the bombing into Google 24 hours prior to the event!

Then on Z News Telegram channel in a comment to this post a reader showed that Google suddenly updated the status of the mall from “Permanently closed” to “Open”. A single review was also deleted – one that told that the mall was closed 4 months ago. It is also so that the flow of Google reviews of the mall stopped the same 4 month ago. The comments under that post continue to discuss the possibility of a deliberate arson of the defunct mall as the real target – a military warehouse is some distance away.

The War on Fakes Telegram channel, which I highly recommend even though it is in Russian only, posted own analysis. Read the translation under the original post:

Fake: The Russian military fired at the Amstor shopping center in Kremenchug. This was announced by the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky.

Truth: The Amstor Shopping Center is located next to the Kremenchug Road Machinery Plant and the Kremenchug railway station. In one of the videos, it seems to people that the rocket hit the factory (the phrase “Dormash, Dormash”). In addition, according to sources familiar with the course of the special operation, the Amstor shopping center was used as a warehouse for storing military equipment, as was the Retroville shopping center in Kiev.

Kremenchug station is one of the most important railway junctions in Ukraine, it connects the central and western parts of the country. In addition, there is a locomotive depot (PM-6) and the Kremenchug power supply span (EC-8) in Kremenchug. The station is actively used to supply fuel from the Kremenchug refinery for the needs of the APU.

The Kremenchug Plant of road machines is located 90 meters from the shopping center. Since 2014, the plant has been repairing equipment for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. A railway line leads to the plant from the Kremenchug station.

Vladimir Zelensky said that there were about a thousand civilians in the shopping center, however, the parking lot in front of the shopping center is almost empty, there are few cars on it. In addition, among the people who walk around the parking lot, there are a lot of military men in “pixel” uniforms (regular APU T-shirts, camouflage bags), some of them are armed with machine guns. At the same time, there are practically no women on the video that Zelensky posted, as well as on videos on social networks.

It doesn’t look like the mall was working at all. In Instagram (the social network is recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation), according to the geotag “Amstor shopping center” there are no photos of visitors since March. The reviews on Internet sites and Google maps stopped coming also in March. Apparently, the equipment repaired at Dormash was stored in the shopping center.

Despite the unconfirmed nature of Zelensky’s statement about a thousand visitors in the shopping center and the official information about the two dead, the international media quickly picked up the news in the context of “the Russian missile that hit the shopping center with 1,000 visitors”.

A NATO summit will be held in the coming days, during which Vladimir Zelensky intends to ask for military assistance. Now the Ukrainian authorities are preparing the ground to make a new Bucha out of Amstor.

And to round off, a few more relevant posts from AzMilitary1 Telegram channel with a lot of extra details from the ground, maps, and photos:

A big one – the Western MSM was waiting for the “news”: