“It is worth noting that this is far from the first targeted information attack on the Fire Point company.”, — write: www.unian.ua
It is worth noting that this is far from the first targeted information attack on the Fire Point company.
Photo by mil.gov.uaMembers of the Public Anti-Corruption Council under the Ministry of Defense (MoD) accused New York Times (NYT) journalist Andrew Kramer of “outright lies” in his recent article about the Ukrainian defense company Fire Point. This was reported by veteran Yuriy Gudymenko and journalist Tetyana Nikolayenko, members of the GAR MO.
A NYT reporter wrote that the DOD has allegedly called for a parliamentary inquiry into allegations of quality and pricing problems with Fire Point drones. Members of the public council categorically call this point untrue.
“HAR MO did not contact parliament about FirePoint drones, as the NYT wrote about it. HAR MO has no habit and tradition of contacting parliament at all. When we collect enough evidence, we pass it directly to the law enforcement agencies. There were simply no requests to parliament about FirePoint, this is an outright lie. The New York Times can refute it if it shows a letter or a post with our appeal to the parliament (will not show, because it is a lie),” Yuriy Gudymenko wrote.
Tetiana Nikolayenko also criticized the journalist’s statement regarding the unnamed audit, which allegedly claims that the FP-1 drone of the Fire Point company could be produced cheaper than its price. The NYT reporter pointed out that “auditors found that this estimate should have triggered negotiations by the Defense Procurement Agency of Ukraine, but it did not,” and the contracts were awarded about $16.7 million more than the cheaper manufacturing option.
“I don’t know who leaked it to him, but one DASU audit for 2023 is more than 400 pages. The audits he writes about were conducted on other dates, and there are other numbers. Maybe bigger, but different. He obviously could not analyze the data from the audit, otherwise you would have seen the facts, and not a set of general phrases.”
Tetiana Nikolayenko assured that the public council is monitoring the situation with Fire Point, but the information they have is not sufficient. Gudymenko called the NYT’s publication “a frank provocation” whose purpose is “to force us to come out with a premature communication, without collected facts.”
GAR MO assured that they will report when they have enough information about Fire Point or any other company.
It is worth noting that this is far from the first targeted information attack on the Fire Point company.
Previously, People’s Deputy Yaroslav Zhelezniak systematically discredited the company, publicly calling it “Mindych’s company” and spreading dubious statements that had no evidence.
In addition, Zheleznyak periodically commented on internal political processes in Ukraine in the articles of the journalist Kramer, thereby contributing to the formation of a negative informational image of Ukraine on the international arena.