16 people lost their lives on the afternoon of September 6 in the Kostiantinivka market, a Ukrainian municipality in the province of Donetsk, on the Bakhmut front, in the east of the country. A missile hit the commercial area, killing civilians and injuring more than 30. The Ukrainian authorities, starting with the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, did not hesitate to point to Russia as responsible for the massacre. This was also assumed by the Ukrainian and international media, including EL PAÍS and The New York Times. The American newspaper published an investigation this Tuesday in which it concluded that the missile was not Russian, but a Ukrainian anti-aircraft rocket.
This newspaper has collected visual and physical evidence and testimonies that indicate that the catastrophe was caused by a missile from a Buk anti-aircraft system that probably functioned defectively. The Buk in the hands of Ukraine are Soviet batteries produced in the 70s and 80s of the last century. The newspaper emphasizes that its journalists were able to access the scene of the events despite the military authorities’ express prohibition against them doing so. The Ukrainian Armed Forces impose severe restrictions on the work of the media on the Donetsk front in the east and the Zaporizhia front in the southeast. The High Command on the Zaporizhia front explains to EL PAÍS that these limitations are to protect the integrity of journalists and also to preserve the secrecy of their offensive operations.
In recent days, analysis of the video from a security camera that recorded the moment of the missile impact had appeared on social networks such as X (formerly Twitter). The video was shared by Zelensky himself, accompanied by a particularly harsh message: “Anyone in the world who continues to associate with anything that is Russian is simply ignorant of reality. It is atrocious evil. The blatant evil, the total inhumanity.” Analysis of the video, some carried out by prominent commentators on the war, indicated that the missile, according to its trajectory, did not come from the Russian lines but from the Ukrainian rear.
Kostiantinivka is located just 10 kilometers from the zero line of the fighting and the exchange of artillery is constant, as well as the Russian attacks on the municipality. The night before the market disaster, Russian artillery wounded five civilians in the same town. The Ukrainian authorities assured that the missile that hit the market was a Russian S-300, an anti-aircraft rocket also of Soviet origin used by both armies. Russian forces have been using S-300s recurrently since autumn 2022 to hit ground targets. This adaptation, from surface-to-air to surface-to-surface missile, causes the missile to lose precision. Several Russian S-300s killed 30 civilians from a humanitarian convoy in September 2022, in addition to injuring more than 90.
The journalists of The New York Times They obtained visual evidence on the market that would indicate that the destruction was caused by a 9M38, a missile used by the Buk shuttles. The newspaper would also have confirmed from the ground that at the time of the incident two Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles were fired from the vicinity of Kostiantinivka.
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It is the second known occasion in which a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile has caused deaths by accident, and also the second occasion in which kyiv accuses Russia of this. A missile from a Ukrainian S-300 battery fell in November 2022 in Poland, killing two people. The missile was fired in western Ukraine to intercept a Russian cruise missile. Months after the incident, Zelensky continued to claim that the death of the two Polish citizens was due to a Russian attack, despite the Polish authorities and NATO confirming that it was a Ukrainian projectile.
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