The independent Russian news site The Insider interviewed Natalia Vertinskaya and reported on the YouTube video posted by the former Kyiv resident who now lives in the US, in which she detailed the links between Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov with relatives who still live in Ukraine and called on him to cease attacking the country.
The Insider verified the fact that Vertinskaya’s father is Belousov’s first cousin who still lives in Kyiv and the fact that Major General Alexander Belousov, Natalia’s great-grandfather and Andrei Belousov’s grandfather, is indeed buried with his wife in Ukraine’s capital. It seems that neither Belousov nor his father, a prominent Russian economist have had contact with their Ukrainian relatives for many years.
In the video, Vertinskaya, who now lives in the United States, said she has a disabled child who she regularly took for treatment at the Ohmatdyt children's hospital that was struck by a Russian Kh-101 long-range cruise missile on July 8, killing two adults and a child and injuring dozens of others.
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The hit on Kyiv was part of an almost 40 missile and UAV mass attack on five Ukrainian cities Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro, Kropyvnytskyi, and Pokrovsk during which more than 40 civilians were killed and almost 200 were injured.
Vertinskaya says her 75-year-old father, who she doesn’t name, was badly affected by Monday’s attack as he lives in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv in which another building was struck by a separate missile. In the video she says, “I am urging you, Uncle Andrei, to think about what you are doing - and stop. Please stop!”
She then asks those who view the video to “…tell the whole world that the Russian Defense Minister has a cousin living in Kyiv. And his grandparents and his aunt are also buried in Kyiv. My father continues to watch over these graves.”
She says the motivation for the video was finding out that my uncle became the Minister of Defense of Russia and now launches missiles at my father – his cousin – I could no longer keep silent.”
It seems that Vertinskaya’s original video had posted shortly after Belousov was appointed but it was only following Monday’s mass attack on Ukraine that it attracted media interest.
This led pro-Russian media to claim her video was part of a fake news onslaught orchestrated by “the entire collective West.” They suggested that Ukraine was using the pretext of the alleged Russian missile attack on the Ohmatdyt children’s hospital to coincide with the start of the NATO summit in Washington DC as a means of deceitfully securing more funds for its war against Russia.
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