“What’s perhaps interesting in this one is the way that Russian officialdom started building the narrative on a false flag a month ago,” Ben Nimmo, a researcher at Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who studies disinformation campaigns, told The Daily Beast. “There’s a measure of foresight and forethought there which is quite interesting.”

Beginning in early March, Russia’s ministry of defense began to claim that it had picked up intelligence about “provocations” planned by Islamist militant groups outside Damascus designed “to accuse government troops of using chemical weapons in the Eastern Ghouta against civilians.” Defense ministry officials later elaborated that the conspiracy to mount false-flag chemical attacks involved a whole cast of characters ranging from U.S. special operations forces operating in the Syrian desert to Free Syrian Army members in the south of the country to al Qaeda members in Idlib Province.