Russia plans ‘very graphic’ fake video as pretext for Ukraine invasion, US claims

US officials claim they have evidence of a Russian plan to make a "very graphic" fake video of a Ukrainian attack as a pretext for an invasion.

The alleged plot would involve using corpses, footage of blown-up buildings, fake Ukrainian military hardware, Turkish-made drones and actors playing the part of Russian-speaking mourners.

"We don't know definitively that this is the route they are going to take, but we know that this is an option under consideration," the deputy national security adviser, Jonathan Finer, told MSNBC, adding that the video "would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they would have created themselves".

Finer added: "That would involve the deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed, of people purportedly killed in an incident like this."

The Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said the video would have purported to show a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory or Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine and would be "very graphic". He added that the US believed that the plan had the backing of the Kremlin.

"Our experience is that very little of this nature is not approved at the highest levels of the Russian government," Kirby said.

US officials said the video would show Turkish-made Bayraktar drones taking part in the fabricated attack as a way of implicating Nato.