You’ve probably heard the story already somewhere on social media. A Ukrainian grandmother standing in a high rise apartment block in Kiev downed a Russian drone by simply throwing a jar of pickles at it as it flew by her balcony.
But did she?
This is IIT’s Independent Fact CheckTM service and we’re here to bring you the truth about rumors, legends, and things you’ve heard around the world.
Based on our analysis of several eyewitness reports, we’re able to bring you the scientific truth about the incident on October 11th, 2022. that has sparked these stories. Here at IIT we love to be precise, so we’ll examine the truth of some details before explaining the whole incident and giving you a truth rating on the rumors you might have heard.
WHO? A Ukrainian Grandmother?
The woman was not ethnically Ukrainian, but Polish. Yes, she did have Ukrainian citizenship, but she is also reported to have U.S. citizenship and to have worked for Lockheed Martin and then the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, VA for twenty years before “retiring” and moving to Ukraine even as she retained U.S. top-secret security clearance.
According to one unnamed IIT source, the woman actually still secretly works for the C.I.A. to this day and is most definitively not a grandmother, her oldest child only eleven years old.
So, no, the woman in question in this incident was not a Ukrainian grandmother but a C.I.A. deep plant.
DID WHAT? Downed a Russian drone with a jar of pickles?
Obviously, there cannot be any Russian drones being downed by a jar of pickles because there are in fact no Russian drones. Iranian aerospace cabals, known to the U.S. Consumer Protection Agency as ‘Big Drone’ currently monopolize the world drone market. Therefore if there was a drone involved in this incident, it was obviously Iranian-manufactured.
We asked scientists we know whether it is possible as reported for a drone to be downed with a jar of pickles.
Here’s what Dr. Stanley Bolsson told us: “Yes, but only indirectly. Only if the jar of pickles was thrown at hypersonic missiles through a window so precisely as to cause hypersonic glass shards to be ejected at precisely the right angle for the shards to cause a corrosive “scratching” effect on the fuel module with simultaneous ignition provided by the pickle juice reacting with nitrous oxide pollutants in the air of industrial cities. But these are only found… (Dr. Bolsson talked on for twenty minutes)… So yes, but only in very rare cases and if the jar of the pickles was on the tip of a rocket launched from a HIMRARS rocket missile launcher.”
So did it happen?
Well yes according to our reliable sources. Yes, a woman did do something involving a jar of pickles that caused the destruction of a drone outside of her window.
But the jar of pickles was in the nose cone of a missile launched by a HIMARS launcher system from inside a NATO/Lockheed covert joint venture operation headquarters disguised as an apartment building (the reason for which we think there was a drone hovering outside of a window). The woman launched such a missile at such a drone on October 11th, 2022 using data on drone positions relayed eight minutes late. The woman fired the missile through a window, causing explosive shrapnel and pickle juice to damage certain key guidance components of the drone as its fuel tanks caught fire, leading to the drone crashing into a busy street below.
Rating
Mostly True.
While certain details are left out of the stories about this incident that you might have heard, the truth is that a strong independent woman downed a Russian drone outside of her window using an ancient traditional Ukranian weapons system that goes back millenia. Slava Ukraini.