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More Evidence That Ukraine Fired The Missile Which Killed Dozens In Kramatorsk
This is a follow on to yesterday's Ukrainian Tochka-U missile strike on the Kramatorsk railway station. Russia no longer has Tochka missiles (search for Tochka in the pdf) while the Ukraine, Belarus and several other states still use them.
There is now additional evidence that the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces. The facts do not matter in 'western' media who stick to whatever story they are told to produce. Still, I do believe that facts matter at least in the long term and that there is a historic value in documenting them.
The Tochka-U is a tactical missile with a maximum range of some 120 kilometer. It is typically fired from a transporter, erector, launcher vehicle (TEL) with little need of preparations.
The TEL vehicle for the Tochka is a six wheeled BAZ 5921 /5922. These are amphibious floating hull chassis. The picture below shows a BAZ TEL in parade mode with a Tochka missile slightly erected. In the normal transport mode the missile lies horizontally under a protective roof.
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There were several claims of such vehicles being seen in Belarus or with Russian forces in Ukraine. But not every six wheeled BAZ vehicle can be said to be a Tochka missile TEL or Tochka transporter. There are various look alike variants of the vehicle with radar or communication equipment or simply used as transporters or ferries for all kind of goods.
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The Tochka missile, below in a firing position, consists of a rocket engine, four fins and grids to direct its course, a solid fuel compartment and a warhead at its front. A complete missile weighs about 2,000 kilogram.
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There are various warhead types available which weigh about 500 kilogram each.
The warhead which was used in Kramatorsk is a fragmentation one with 20 sub-munitions (gray) each with some 7.5 kilogram of explosives enclosed in a metal hull.
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Over the target area these sub-munitions get expelled and explode while still in the air and each one creates some 800 fragments. The warhead thus leaves no hole in the ground but expels a huge number of deadly metal fragments at high speed over a relative large area. The Tochka missiles are not very precise. They have a circular error probability (CEP) of some 150 meters. They are so called area weapons to be used against concentrations of infantry or unarmored vehicles.
After being fired the rocket engine propels the warhead towards is destination. Shortly before the impact the warhead separates from the booster section and continues its path while the rocket engine shuts down. Having lost its thrust and aerodynamic tip the relative heavy booster section will then tumble to the ground. If everything works as designed the booster section always falls short of the warhead section.
Which brings us to the scene in Kramatorsk. Several pictures from the scene show the booster section of the missile.
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The place where it landed was geo-located as being near a parking space some 60 meter west-southwest of the railway station. Here is the Google maps view of the railway station area. The warhead explosions happened on the east side of the station over the departure platform.
The location of the booster debris and where the explosion happened allows one to point out the trajectory from where the missile was fired. I have checked the locations depicted below and found them to be correct.
North is to the top. The station is encircled and the point is where the booster section landed. The arrow shows the trajectory the missile must have taken.
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Oh, the map is annotated in Russian and you don't trust Russian sources? Well, here is the New York Times posting a similar map.
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Here is map from Liveuamap depicting the current front lines in Ukraine. Kramatorsk is marked in yellow.
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Note that there are no Russian or Russia-aligned forces west-southwest of Kramatorsk within the 120 km maximum range of a Tochka missile. The missile must have been fired by Ukrainian forces.
Unsurprisingly the Russian military has come to the same conclusion:
An analysis of the engagement radius of the warhead, as well as the characteristic position of Tochka-U missile's tail section, clearly confirm that it was launched from a south-western direction away from Kramatorsk.
According to intelligence reports, one of the divisions of the 19th Missile Brigade armed with Tochka-U missile systems at the time of the strike on Kramatorsk was located near Dobropol'e in Donetsk Region, 45 km south-west of Kramatorsk.
This area is still under the full control of the Ukrainian military grouping troops in Donbass.
The publicly available evidence shows that the Ukrainian military must have fired the missile that killed some 50 Ukrainian civilians in Kramatorsk.
The only purpose of the attack I can think of was to create propaganda that, when distributed as 'Russian attack' through 'western' media, will create more military support for Ukraine.
Everyone who urges to give more arms to the Ukraine or who eggs it on to continue this war is guilty of creating impetus for more incidents like the one seen in Kramatorsk.
@ 359 psychohistorian,
The decisions being made right now by the EU leaders and the European Heads of State are not the type of choices that can be walked back within a politician’s lifetime, at the very least all of the current crop of EU leaders would need to be removed from power, because I cant see Borrell or Von Der Leyen, changing their stance on Russia, Putin, relations with US and Ukraine or the EU’s energy policy, it’s a web of interlocking positions that will have to all be abandoned before a new policy course could be pursued without being immediately being dragged down by the other positions. We saw what happened with NordStream2, Germany tried to go its’ own way, but because Germany wasn’t willing to abandon the other positions, the underlining policy “logic” of the Anti-Russia, Pro-USA position gradually ensnared NordStream2 and ultimately broke it.
NordStream2 is completely dead, even if German and the EU said to hell with the US today and embraced it, Russia has seen how unreliable and treacherous the EU & Germany is, so the Russians will not trust them again with a major energy deal (remember Russia basically wasted $10 billion dollars on a empty metal tube that the Germans are now in the process of stealing). Germany will never see another major energy deal with Russia for at least another 30yrs, the best they could hope for is Russia agreeing to still sell to them on the spot market and maintain existing contracts, but even that is looking very very iffy nowadays.
For the EU in general, things will need to get a lot, lot worse before people start demanding changes and those changes will be very slow, because the EU never does anything quickly. Most likely I expect that inflation will explode over the rest of the year, officially up 20-35%. We will see energy rationing and maybe even food rationing in France and Germany between Dec-Feb. The EU will try to respond by giving France and Germany preferential access to food & fuel rations (screw you Italy, Poland, Hungery, Spain, etc…) and blame Russia for everything. There will be plenty of protests but they will accomplish nothing. Elections will be held but the EU will pull out all of the stops to again ensure that establishment parties either win or that the people’s choice is frozen out of power. It will take at least 4-6 years for the EU establishment to be willing to try a new course, but by that time the window will have long since closed and the EU will just sort of muddle around with the people having accepted higher energy costs and inflation. And that is assuming there is no US war on Russia or a US war on China (both of which are quite possible).
There are only two possible good side effects of this process 1) The Greens are going to get a huge amount of the blame for the energy crisis, sure Russia will be the official bad guy, but the Greens will take all of the domestic political blame and be utterly destroyed as a political force for their energy policies. Coal & nuclear power plants will be reopened and the climate agenda/Green new deal in Europe will be dead as a doornail. 2) With all of the massive arms sales that the US/NATO is forcing on the European nations, Europeans will start worrying about being nuked back into the stone age and complaining about their empty bellies while their leaders bankrupt the nation with arms purchases, we’ll probably see some sort of limited revival of the Anti-war movements that were so big in the 1980s, it will take 10 or so years for them to show any political results, but any climb down by the EU leadership from their Anti-Russia position will have to start with a domestic push to at least talk to the Russians again.
Bottom line, things will keep getting worse in the EU states for at least another 4-6yr (maybe 10yrs). After that period, Russian-EU relations will stabilize and we’ll probably see some arms control talks that the EU initiates/pressures the US to discuss with Russia (maybe 3-5yrs). If successful, we’ll then see a limited rollback of some of the bigger sanctions (tit for tat) with Russia over the next 3-6yrs. After that (10-17yrs) we might talk of things getting close to normal again, but realistically they will never go back to what EU-Russian relations were like in 2008 or even like in 2014. But this could all be blown up entirely if the US goes to war with Russia or China
with respect to the US, a conflict with China over Taiwan is pretty much guaranteed at this point (maybe even this year!) but keeping this discussion focused on Russia. US-Russian relations will keep getting worse as long as the current crop of US leaders (both parties) as in power. Thankfully the US is now a Gerontocracy ruled by 70yr+ fools, so they are already dropping out of power and into the cold hard ground where they belong (enjoy your new home in Hell, Albright, Powell and McCain!!!), these figures should be mostly eliminated in another 10yr or so. Still we can expect things to get worse for at least another 2yrs or so. hopefully, relations might stabilize while the US deals with a crisis with China, assuming the US avoids WW3 with China. The US will probably be focused on Africa and Asia, confident that it has Europe under lock and key, which will mean relations with Russia will go into a freezer for another decade or two since the US wont see Russia as a rival for European influence anymore. At some point the US will want to talk to Russia either for arms control issues with China, because the Europeans are whining about military budgets, or possibly to deal with some issue in the Middle East. This might lead to better relations with Russia, but this will be even longer than with Europe, 20-30yrs at least and that’s assuming the Americans need the Russian’s help on something and even then the US sanctions will NEVER be removed (but by then both economies will be completely separate and incompatible so there will be no desire or benefit to reversing the sanctions)
Posted by: Kadath | Apr 10 2022 4:50 utc | 377
I see a lot of comments about the apparent lack of damage and gore, particularly when compared to a near identical strike in downtown Donetsk, and I have to agree — with the caveat that we’re, obviously, not on the ground ourselves and see only what the footage permits us to see.
It’s worth keeping in mind that if one is creating atrocities solely for media consumption, there’s always going to be a significant fictional component (whether in guilt attribution, method of execution, victim count, timeframe or any other salient detail) that can be tweaked to better suit its purpose but, in addition to that, there may or may not be a real component.
So, for example, the damage caused by a munition that has passed its best before date might, reasonably, fail to produce the desired result. Although the booster, presumably, landed in a good spot for an exposé, the charge may instead have perforated the platforms behind the station, or landed as a harmless lump somewhere else due to a failure in the explosive charge. Once the inspection team feels it’s safe enough to approach the scene, it then becomes their job to create an appropriate spectacle out of whatever materials they actually have. Not enough bodies? Take a few out of cold storage or create some new ones, or use medical dummies where you can get away with it. Not enough destruction? Set a few cars on fire in the parking lot or get a few wrecks from the scrap yard. Maybe there are a handful of actual victims, but not where your narrative would like them to be, say on the tracks or in a park down the road? Well, perhaps you’d load them up in a van and then dump them in a pile outside the station, providing them with prop luggage to make the scene look more authentic.
The most complicated aspect is to organize an authentic human reaction, which is why it’s preferable to have an authentic component act as the catalyst for the fabricated narrative. The middle-aged gentleman cradling his dead wife after the Donetsk attack could not be replaced by any number of artificially added bodies, children’s toys, flattened prams and other typical props that become the focus of a generic emotional manipulation. Chaotic and adrenaline fueled interviews taken minutes after an event give life to details that might not even be present in the image feed. But, if the scene has been built from the ground up or tweaked for a prolonged period of time, the only option to achieve a similar effect is via simulation.
However, the presence of actors, be they professional or simply willing collaborators off the street, risk undermining the entire operation via face recognition or running off script. I’m reminded of the White Helmets freeze-frame in the rubble meme, which for a lot of disinterested observers put into question all of their footage both before and after. So, if your authentic component fails to materialize, you might just be better off closing the scene to the public entirely and not take any interviews, real or otherwise. From reading various twitter feeds and watching reports over the last month, I get the impression that the pro-Ukrainian media machine has, largely, decided to keep the narrative contained. There’s copious footage of bodies and destruction with very occasional human interaction. If not for the accompanying description branding these as Russian atrocities, the viewer might think that there’s an outbreak of blood thirsty psychopaths documenting their work, which to my mind isn’t a bad take. The Russian coverage is the exact opposite, consisting almost entirely of interviews and blurring as much of the carnage as possible. This, in turn, lent itself to conspiracy theories early on that the conflict was a simulated exercise without any real casualties or destruction. But I digress.
To summarize, scenes like the one in Kramatorsk or Bucha can reasonably be expected to consist of both real and fabricated elements. On balance, the same is likely true of the Russian coverage as well, being that a large segment consists of claims which are difficult to verify independently. As an example, the vast majority of Ukrainian POW all tell the same story; that they were recently conscripted, that they never fired a single shot, that they were chefs or medics — even the career officers say the same shit. The binary approach of either taking all the information presented at face value, despite inconsistencies, or rejecting all the information where the details don’t add up, can reasonably be expected to fall short in the face of a more nuanced reality.
Posted by: Skiffer | Apr 10 2022 7:32 utc | 394
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