No evidence Russia captured NATO officers in Ukraine

A claim is spreading online that Russian special forces captured two British colonels and a secret intelligence services agent while they were on a mission for NATO in Ochakiv, in southern Ukraine.

According to the false narrative, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Carroll, Colonel Edward Blake and the unnamed MI6 agent were supposedly operating undercover, with Russia labelling them “illegal combatants”. The United Kingdom allegedly claimed that they were tourists interested in history who ended up in Ochakiv by accident.

In some cases, the story is shared with a supposed image of the men. Social media users around Europe urge the media to investigate the matter.

Euroverify traced the story to several fringe platforms, including the Pravda disinformation network —a French-language pro-Russian Telegram channel—and a website called Core Insights, which says it’s a risk advisory and cybersecurity company.

They all posted the story on 2 August, with the Core Insights blog post stating: “This is the first real-life proof that NATO itself is actively waging war against Russia”.

However, there is no evidence that any of this is the case, and plenty to suggest that the narrative is part of wider pro-Russian, anti-Western propaganda.

While the Pravda network and pro-Russian Telegram channels are established, unreliable sources, a scan of the rest of Core Insights’ blog posts shows many that parrot reporting by Russian state-controlled news, and others that mirror Kremlin-aligned narratives.

For example, it shares a post based on an article by Russian state-controlled international news television network RT about a supposed Ukrainian plot to assassinate a Russian defence industry leader, and another about Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stating that Ukraine is demonstrating “borderline savagery”.

Many articles, including the one about the British soldiers, are also attributed to a “Hal Turner”, who shares the name of an extremist, white-supremacist US commentator. This Hal Turner is known for spreading hoaxes and conspiracy theories. This means that, if it were indeed him producing the posts, their reliability is severely diminished.

The tone of the post about the British officers is clearly very biased, too. “The British have been caught, red-handed, and the implications for Britain, and NATO as a whole, are now E X T R E M E L Y bad,” it says, for example.

“The British had the gall to tell the Russians that the men ‘were interested in naval history and wanted to visit the coast where battles were fought during the Second World War’,” is another example.

The image of the two colonels is clearly AI-generated, not least due to their passports, which appear distorted with the text illegible and the British coat of arms mangled.

Even other fringe sites, such as the Norwegian website steigan.no—an established vector of Russian propaganda—deleted an article which repeated the story due to “poor fact-checking”.

There has been no official announcement by the UK government about the matter, nor has there been any reporting on it by well-known media outlets.

A NATO official told Euroverify that the claim that the alliance is engaged in a war against Russia is “bogus” and “detached from reality”.

“Our position has been clear and consistent throughout,” the official said. “Russia has been waging a full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine for over three years. Russia’s war is enabled by North Korean troops, weapons and ammunition, Iranian drones and missiles, and Chinese dual-use technology. These countries are also strengthening their political and economic ties.”

“NATO supports Ukraine’s right to self-defence, as enshrined in the UN Charter,” the official continued. “Allies have been providing unprecedented military assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. The best way to help end the war, and secure a just and lasting peace, is to ensure Ukraine can enter any negotiations from a position of strength.”

Ultimately, there’s no proof for the common pro-Kremlin line that NATO is actively engaging in Russia’s war in Ukraine.