The impact of a missile weighing almost a thousand kilos at dizzying speed against an apartment building has already claimed the lives of thirty people while dozens of missing are being searched for
Ukraine fears that under the rubble of the missile that destroyed an apartment building in Dnipro this Saturday hides the largest massacre of civilians in the entire war carried out in a single attack. The emergency services have already located 30 corpses (one is a child) and transferred 73 injured people to hospitals, including 13 minors). But about 45 residents of the property are still missing and it is feared that many of them remain buried by a mantle of concrete, cement and iron given the level of destruction of the residential complex.
The anguish is maximum as Sunday progresses. Mobile phones have stopped ringing. Their beeps were essential this past dawn so that the rescue teams could guide themselves in the middle of the ruins. Search dogs have also been key in the midst of desolation and darkness. A group of 39 neighbors has managed to be saved from death. At least six were children. Five crossed the fine line between dream and nightmare. They lay on their beds and woke with a start to a barrage of debris. The sixth no longer dreams. Doctors have only been able to certify his death.
«I woke up, I heard an explosion and I had time to get out of the apartment. My house has disappeared,” explains one of the affected residents, Ivan, 18, on television. The Peremoh development, where he lived, emerges this Sunday as the main symbol of the barbarism of the Russian invasion, even above the missile explosion that destroyed the Kramatorsk shopping center in June and wiped out twenty lives. The rocket has impacted this time in the middle of a huge building. Simply, the two central blocks have disappeared. Through it you can see the other side of the city. There were 72 apartments of which not a single trace remains. According to the Dnipro authorities, another 230 houses are damaged and it cannot be ruled out that the two sides of the complex could collapse. 1,100 residents are at risk of being left without shelter amid the gloom of a ravaged, dark and frozen city.
There is a circle of destruction around Peremoh. Hundreds of apartments have lost their windows. The door frames have been thrown off. Some roofs have also blown off. The intensity of the explosion was such that 38 cars and vans have been reduced to shrapnel and metal balls. The mayor, Boris Filatov, says that everything will get worse. “There is little hope of finding many survivors,” he says, aware that the clock is ticking against the neighbors and the wounded who may be found under the ruins. In addition, nighttime temperatures “have dropped to two degrees below zero,” significantly reducing the chances of survival. Hell has no flames. It is a perpetual winter. However, the guide dogs are not given rest, nor are the volunteer brigades that have already removed no less than 3,700 tons of cement.
They didn’t know it, but they were already doomed when Russia fired the KH-22 (or X-22, as it’s also labeled) missile. Known as the ‘aircraft carrier killer’, it is a long-range anti-ship projectile designed by the former Soviet Union in order to transfer artillery warfare to sea. It weighs almost a thousand kilos. It’s easy to imagine the devastation that a ton of explosives can cause.
An “act of terrorism”
The fact that Russia has resorted to this missile to attack a city full of civilians and buildings that do not offer any resistance to such tremendous destructive power can be explained, according to experts, for two reasons: the shortage of higher precision ammunition (a fact that has affected the invading troops for months due to the impossibility of manufacturing the most sophisticated weapons at a higher speed) or the desire to shock the enemy with an atrocious massacre. The bombardment of Dnipro, it must not be forgotten, has been the culmination of the occupation of Soledar and two days of artillery assaults in Donetsk of whose intensity there are few precedents in this war.
The MKB Raduga aerospace company, located on the outskirts of Moscow, has been commissioned to develop the KH-22, whose lethal inspiration dates back to World War II. The Soviet high command realized that the days of traditional naval battles had passed and they had to move towards a theater of operations where the fighting took place ‘at a distance’, through the use of long-range projectiles and aircraft adapted as anti-ship fighter-bombers. . Actually, in this case it can be affirmed that these muds came from those muds. The current invasion of Ukraine is still a translation of those warlike principles. The infantry strategies and large blocks of armored cars, present in the first months of occupation, have been simplified into an artillery war where the two sides exchange howitzers and Moscow complies with one of the precepts of hybrid warfare defended by the head of the General Staff and current person in charge of the invasion, Valeri Gerasimov: sow terror among civilians (massacres like the one in Dnipro are an example of this perversion) and create the conditions for popular discontent that leads to a rebellion against the enemy. An objective that Russia is attempting by destroying energy infrastructure so that the Ukrainian population suffers the hardship of cold and frostbite this winter.
The KH-22 was built with the United States aircraft carriers and their escort ships in mind. If it causes a forty-foot-deep sinkhole in the ground, it doesn’t have much of a problem sinking a ship. So what can’t you do against a brick and mortar building? However, beyond its demolition capacity, it is scary because it is practically unstoppable. In fact, the Ukrainian General Staff acknowledged this Saturday that its anti-aircraft defenses are not prepared to intercept this type of rocket, at least until the United States and its NATO partners supply them with Patriot or SAMP-T missiles. The shipment of a consignment of Patriot batteries has already been approved by the White House.
To explain that ease of escape, one must pay attention to the functional mechanism of the ‘carrier killer’. Pure evil. The warhead reaches between 12,000 and 27,000 meters of altitude depending on the conditions in which it is fired. Once it reaches the ceiling, it falls under its own weight tracing an elliptical arc in a vertiginous descent, which means that, when it touches its target, the detonation of almost a thousand kilos of explosives is added to the devastating energy of the fall. In the case of the Dnipro tragedy, it can be calculated that the missile hit the building at just over 5,000 kilometers per hour.
This massacre is surprising because the Kremlin carefully selects where to use its KH-22s. In fact, it has only used them 120 times in Ukraine, and usually to destroy large energy facilities. The spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuriy Ihnat, described this morning the attack on Dnipro as an “act of terrorism against civilians” by using ammunition “of this type in a densely populated city.” Ihnat has called on the international community to condemn Russia’s decision to use the KH-22 and urged the Western allies to send anti-aircraft batteries capable of stopping this threat to kyiv as soon as possible. Moscow, meanwhile, already has the KH-32 in operation, an evolution of the Dnipro missile that rises to 40 kilometers in altitude. Impersonal contempt for life can always go further.
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