Although the Russian Defense Ministry claims that the children’s hospital was hit by debris from a missile shot down by Ukrainian anti-aircraft guns, several emerging evidences and open sources (OSINT, short for “open source intelligence” research) show instead, in a way that is difficult to refute, that the rocket directly hit the hospital, where some remains of the rear part of the missile have already been found.
Moscow calls the news of the Russian missile on the hospital a provocation “on the eve of the upcoming meeting (summit) of its supporters from NATO”, the Russians claim that “the photos and video footage published by Kiev clearly confirm the fact of destruction due to the fall of a Ukrainian air defense missile launched from an anti-aircraft missile system inside the city”. In fact, according to a video published by UNIAN, the attack of the Russian armed forces on a children’s hospital was a direct hit and not an accidental fall of debris, as shown by the footage of the scene: a completely intact missile can be seen aiming and hitting the hospital, at an angle almost perpendicular to the building. Ukrainian military expert Leonid Dmitriev explains: “It is clear that the rocket is flying under control, there are no signs of damage”. And several other military analysts agree. Including on the type of missile that hits the building. The site of the crash was geolocated by a German military expert, Julian Repke, whose analysis confirms that the footage shows exactly the rocket that fell on Okhmatdyt (Repke is also convinced that the missile was launched from a Tu-95 bomber, which was over the Caspian Sea at the time of the launch).
The missile used by the Russians appears to be a Kh-101, according to at least three images released by the Ukrainian SBU, and found at the site of the crash. These are fragments of the rear housing of the Kh-101 missile, complete with serial number and part of the steering wheel of the missile itself. The missile that ended up in the hospital is not similar to those launched by Kyiv’s anti-aircraft systems, military analyst Yan Matveev told Agentstvo. He also said that the shape of the rocket’s body and tail, as well as the position of the wings, correspond to the Russian Kh-101 cruise missile. Fragments of a possible anti-aircraft missile would fall (most likely resulting from the study of comparable events in the past) vertically, and not along an inclined trajectory, as seen in the video, military expert Yuri Fedorov explains. The missile did not rotate around its axis, which indicates that it did not suffer any damage during the flight.
Video analysis also shows that the missile attack on the hospital came from the southwest and – according to the reconstruction of the telegram channel “Nikolaevskij Vanek” – the Russian missiles made a turn in the Rivne region towards the Zhytomyr region, then headed towards Kyiv. With a death toll that, at the time of writing, is unfortunately evolving (for now, 17 people have been killed and 41 injured. In total, including other Ukrainian cities, 30 people have been killed and more than 80 injured).
According to the investigation by the Ukrainian secret services, which are sharing the first evidence that has emerged, the Kh-101 missile was incontrovertibly aimed at the hospital, which would amount, the SBU claims, to a war crime. Kyiv immediately made a formal request to open an international criminal case, based on the one opened in Ukraine by the Security Service, for the crimes provided for in Part 2 of Art. 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (violation of the laws and customs of war, combined with intentional murder).
“The Security Service,” they say in Kyiv, “will do everything possible to ensure that the enemy receives maximum punishment for each of its war crimes, including today’s attack on Ukraine. This punishment will be both legal and moral. A terrorist state is not an abstract concept. There are specific names of the murderers. And nothing will save them from justice,” explains SBU Director Vasyl Malyuk.
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