(NewsNation Now) — The Pentagon confirms this morning that there were plans in the Russian military to stage a so-called “false flag” attack using actors, in some cases pretending to be corpses, to stage what appeared to be the aftermath of a huge Ukrainian attack on Russian forces.

A “false flag” operation is one staged to look like actions were taken that in fact were not. They’re propaganda tools and have been used to justify the actions of governments and other groups to further their agendas or military objectives.

In this case, the staged attack would have given Russian military leaders the excuse they needed to launch an offensive against Ukraine and to sell it to the global community and Russian citizens as simply responding to Ukrainian aggression.

News of this comes just as paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne leave Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on their way to staging areas in Eastern Europe as part of the effort to fortify NATO nations around Ukraine.

Retired Rear Adm. John Kirby, spokesman for the Department of Defense, said, “We believe that Russia would produce a very graphic propaganda video, which would include corpses and actors that would be depicting mourners and images of destroyed locations, as well as military equipment at the hands of Ukraine or the West, even to the point where some of this equipment would be made to look like it was Western-supplied.”

While it’s well-known that Russia is fond of using propaganda tools to justify actions, what’s remarkable is that this is now the third time that the U.S. and its allies have publicly called out Vladimir Putin on discovered Russian plans for such an operation. The effort here is to get ahead of the plans and prevent them from happening in the first place.

Russian officials have so far denied any such plans.