On January 13 -- Old New Year's Day for Orthodox believers -- a commuter bus (marshrutka) traveling from Zlatoustivka to Donetsk, that is north along the H-20 highway, stopped to wait in line at a checkpoint in Volnovakha under control of Ukrainian forces. While the bus was waiting in a long line of civilian vehicles, a Grad rocket struck nearby and mines in an adjacent minefield were set off, killing 13 passengers and wounding 17, some severely.
This is an informal collection of some of the social media and official records of the tragedy and is not meant to be exhaustive or definitive. Some of the sources used in discussing this story are obvious pro-Russian sources such as Military Maps or Colonel Cassad's blog, but they are cited in an effort to get at the facts because in some cases, they unwittingly tell us more than they intended.
This video [GRAPHIC] labeled "And you gave us Grads, you bastards!" [GRAPHIC] was first to emerge from the scene. This is a copy of the original taken by a Ukrainian soldier which was removed because of its graphic nature. I am not posting it here so that this post won't be removed and because it's available without me having to add to the exposure of the victims.
This second video is from the security camera at the checkpoint. It shows a detonation at 14:26 on the internal time-stamp, and explosions all over the nearby fields surrounding the checkpoint. At first the natural question arises, "where's the bus?" A shorter version of the video that didn't show the bus, first released, prompted many to ask whether it was authentic. But the longer version has the camera panning over to the south, where the bus, and a large smoky patch of snow by it can be seen.
A third video is the dashcam footage from a car that was waiting in line behind the bus at the same checkpoint at the same time:
A fourth video is of the aftermath of the hit, and shows a lot of evidence about the nature of the damage from rockets and the rockets themselves:
A fifth video [GRAPHIC] (also here), the most graphic of all the videos, shows the forensics experts taking pictures of the dead bodies and the bus itself.
A sixth video shows two survivors describing what they heard and saw:
HOW MANY PASSENGERS WERE ON THE BUS?
A list of those passengers who were killed (13) and those who were injured (17) -- total 20 -- has been published in both "Novorossiya" media taking the side of the Russian-backed fighters and also Ukrainian media.
The total number of passengers in the bus is not known because we don't know if there are some uninjured passengers (not likely) or some not accounted from (not likely) -- nor we do we know the names of "an employee of the Border Guards" or "an officer of a spetsnaz battalion" in the list of injured people -- presumably they are Ukrainian, but we don't know.
The marshrutka was likely a Bogdan A092 (not a Volkswagen, as some have said). It appears to be the same make as the Bogdan or Bohdan. It is manufactured in Ukraine with Japanese components by Isuzu. It has a capacity for "15-26" people. We don't know yet whether every seat was filled, but it was possible because of disruption of service due to the war and people's need to travel that it would be filled to capacity on the last day of the winter holiday.
It can be common for such buses to have people even standing in the aisles or sitting on suitcases or boxes in the aisles but we don't know exactly how many people were in the bus -- since the driver survived and he is the one who took the tickets and counted the people, this will be learned.
A video taken of the aftermath [GRAPHIC] shows military after they have laid out the dead bodies and are taking pictures, and are also bagging up the belongings of the victims and evidence from the scene. They also make another video of the interior of the bus now without the bodies, in which shell holes can clearly be seen as well. We can see the seat markers show 20 seats along the sides, and then apparently 5 more in the back:
It's not clear if there were people in those seats -- another 5 people who weren't wounded and who aren't in the injured and survivors' list -- but I think it's more likely the luggage was there. I don't see how a single passenger in this bus could not be injured given how many shrapnel holes there are in the side, and given how eye-witnesses said most people died instantly or within minutes of impact -- and we can see there are dead bodies on both sides of the aisle, not just on the right side.
'THERE WAS AN EXPLOSION JUST NOW. THREE GRADS."
A first-responder -- a Ukrainian soldier at the checkpoint -- made the first video of the tragic scene in which he announced, "There was an explosion just now. Three Grads."
Had this statement been intelligible and immediately disseminated, it would have saved a lot of arguments about whether there were multiple grads with more than 40 impacts (because there are 40 launch tubes on the Grad truck). This man, on the scene, presumably right at the checkpoint, said "three Grads." He either saw or heard them, so he said this.
Unfortunately, either people didn't know Russian or if they did (like me) they might have thought he said "There are wounded." (tri hradi versus est raneny which sound alike given that aspirated "h" and rolled "r" sound alike in this accent). How do we know he actually said "three Grads"? One way is that the DNR crowd trying to debunk this story cite him as saying that in an effort to prove the entire thing is planted -- this video is about a certain "discrepancy" in the story that they think exists -- they believe the blue building at the checkpoint "disappears" in the other video supplied by the Ukrainian army, proving it is fake:
On the way to making that argument, they do cite the soldier and don't dispute that he said "There are three Grads":
So they do say -- and write -- that he said that (and I think any native Ukrainian Russian speaker will agree, and it's clear once you think about it, because a man looking at 12 dead people, not wounded people, would not immediately speak of the wounded, but is more likely to have said, after saying "there was an explosion" to comment on what caused it -- three Grads.
And no, the blue building doesn't "disappear"; as one man points out there in the YouTube comments, the black jeep visible at 0:26 is the same black jeep visible in the other video at 1:06 -- and obviously the issue is that the camera is on that very building with the blue roof, which is why that blue roof doesn't show in the video.
Initially, the theory was that one or multiple Grads hit the bus, as @DaJeyPetros of Ukraine@War analyzed:
The Ukrainian media also on their own created an infographic of what they believed had happened:
Ukrainian media publish infographic made by slovoidilo.ua explaining how pro-Russian rebels hit the bus. #Volnovakha pic.twitter.com/RzYg9oY91E
— Tanya Lokot (@tanyalokot) January 13, 2015
They said Grads were fired from a truck approximately 20 kilometers away, which would fit with the range of the Grad missile and an existing known location of the DNR.
That certainly seemed plausible because other social media accounts of other battles in this region which speak of the presence of the Russian-backed DNR fighters.
THE MINE FIELD
The next day after the hit, the Russian-sponsored "Novorossiya" media (the name of the movement advocating a fictitious pro-Russian realm to be made up of parts of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus) began pointing out the mine warning signs along the side of the road, visible in the first Ukrainian military's video. These were unmistakeable, as even without a close-up, their shape, colour and placement indicated they were likely such signs.
These signs were recognizable to locals as mine signs -- they are all over the place in the Donbass now.
The fifth video then unmistakeably shows such a sign near the bus on the side of the road at 11:21:
Colonel Cassad at first spun a theory that Ukrainians "setting up the scene" deliberately didn't show the close-up of the sign, but only showed a pole by a tree -- and he even posited that they broke off the sign so it wouldn't "disrupt the narrative." This is ridiculous, because their first video had the signs in them, recognizable by shape and position to be mine warning signs, and the fifth video shows them as well, close up.
Proving that these signs were there didn't "debunk" the initial Grad version, because now it could be explained that what likely happened is that the Grads stuck the ground by the bus *and* the field and set off the mines.
This theory was then clinched when a dashcam video of one of the drivers in line was released -- the third video above. It shows him waiting in line, we see some movement in the bus, and it appears some person or persons are walking by the side of the road. Then there is a shaking and rumbling, the mines are set off ahead, and then the bus area explodes in fire. The driver immediately turns his car around and drives away from the explosion.
Colonel Cassad, a pro-Russian blogger in Sevastopol (he is Boris Rozhin, the editor of Golos Sevastopolya), uses this video to try to prove that what happened is that someone was already out of the bus and walked into the mine field, that set off the mines and hit the bus. He thinks that is why there was such a huge pool of blood next to the bus -- that was mine-walker or his victim. Or, when the mines exploded up ahead in the field, someone panicked and got off the bus, then stumbled into the minefield, making it worse for everyone by setting off more mines and killing the people in and around the bus.
He has put out an explanation involving a MON-50 or OZM-72 mine (the first was reverse-engineered by the Soviet military from M-18 Claymore mines they found from the Americans in Vietnam.)
But there are also two videos available from the security camera at the checkpoint. They illustrate that the shadows of the rockets can be seen moving along the snowy field and then the mines go off.
MON-50 THEORY AND MON-50 BAG
Colonel Cassad has nevertheless constructed a whole hypothesis around the mines, even saying the Ukrainians deliberately set them off and deliberately filmed the aftermath in such a way as to set up their own claim of a Grad.
He picks up a picture of the MON-50 mine from the Internet:
Then a bag that would ordinarily hold such a mine:
Then says that an object can be seen in the hand of a Ukrainian soldier that looks like just such a mine in such a bag -- in the first video.
Except...the bag for the MON-50 doesn't have any straps hanging down from it. The mine by itself has two struts. But the bag has nothing hanging from it. Yet in this photo above, the bag clearly has some straps hanging from it.
The point is further burned home:
For all the Russian Trolls who can't afford spectacles due to underpayment https://t.co/RP2aVAUUiF #Volnovakha pic.twitter.com/5IUjnvB2Hq
— Ukraine@war (@DajeyPetros) January 16, 2015
Someone points out that it could be a first-aid kit bag:
@DajeyPetros http://t.co/lTdINyCAqT
— Dimaukr (@q15222) January 16, 2015
The shape doesn't quite fit, and for due diligence, the explanation of what the bag is should be forthcoming, but I think the absence of straps hanging from whatever the Ukrainian soldier is holding indicates it's not the MON-50 bag. And then there's this: why would a Ukrainian soldier who had just set off a Claymore-type mine in a mine-field deliberately, to make it look like a Grad hit, let's say, also walk around with another Claymore-type mind in his hand in his military's own video of the scene?! That makes no sense. I'm going to assume this is just another bag.
Aside from the bag, however, Colonel Cassad has other points to make.
MINE CYLINDER
He also says a characteristic cylinder can be seen on the bloody steps of the bus that would indicate it came from that MON-50 mine:
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH ARMS RESEARCHER
Mark Hiznay, the Human Rights Watch arms researcher, very new to Twitter, seems to join specifically to make a point about the MON-50:
Know your preformed fragments (L to R): MON-200, MON-50, 9N235 (4.5g), and 9N210 pic.twitter.com/fHALVkiVco — Mark Hiznay (@MarkHiznay) January 14, 2015
That seems to be saying "this isn't a MON-50" -- but someone else who is an expert can explain it.
But then he appears again with a picture of "Mines in the Donbass":
Mines in the Donbass (L to R): MON-50, MON-90, OZM-72. Photo is mine from Iloviask, Oct. 2014 pic.twitter.com/PM3SdpjhgI— Mark Hiznay (@MarkHiznay) January 16, 2015
So perhaps he is researching the "mines-only" theory, or "Grads plus mines." There are also claims of social media reports from Colonel Cassad that the victims are showing mine parts in the bodies, not rocket shrapnel. So far all that's been shown is a copy of a text message on a phone with names blocked out, claiming to be from somebody who has a relative who works in the hospital where the victims were taken, making this claim.
This is the WORST kind of social media evidence -- hearsay -- and then sent on a phone to somebody else -- double hearsay. There is already a 15-minute video of two survivors in the hospital (see below), so it doesn't seem as if it's a problem to go to the hospital and ask the doctors to say what they have found in the victims' bodies. Naturally, they may be intimidated from telling the truth, or one of them may be found to lie, we don't know. But so far, none of them have said this when they had the opportunity, when journalists first went to the hospital.
If past HRW reports are any indication, research about DNR firing positions and rocket trajectories from such putative firing positions will not interest them in the slightest, and they won't look at them or supply them themselves. They will go by what eyewitnesses say, what wounds they have, what doctors say, and what pieces they find. They may be led in all of this by DNR escorts which may taint the data.
Now that OSCE has said "north-northeastern" possibly implicating either side, HRW may either stay with that ambiguity or ignore it.
Thus, we may get a report from HRW focusing on mines, but Hiznay has indicated on Twitter what interests him in terms of culpability -- whether those mines have a fuse or not. If they do, and can be detonated by remote control, then they are "illegal" under international law (the Ottawa treaty). If they don't have fuses, and just went off themselves, then it's just a sad accident (if I have understood the point correctly).
Yes, I realize this might mean that if these mines have fuses, even if a DNR rocket set them off by landing on them, they might be "illegal" and the Ukrainians will be to blame for Volnovakha.
Regardless, HRW will have to say what set off these mines, as a claim that the Ukrainians detonated their own mines by remote won't hold. Then they either will have to look at the Grad rockets or go with the "mine-walker" theory.
THE "MINE-WALKER" THEORY
There's another reason we know that Colonel Cassad's theory of the "mine-walker" doesn't work, aside from the bag issue, and aside from the possible non-conformity of the pieces found on-site to any known mines -- from the survivors' testimony on camera.
Both men who were injured survivors of the attack say the door was jammed shut on the right side of the bus by the explosion. They couldn't exit from it. The driver, himself wounded and bloodied from shrapnel as the survivors say, exited the bus from his own door on the left side of the bus. He then helped some people get out of the window -- because the door couldn't be used. Eventually when the door was pried open, literally a pool of blood flooded out of it down the stairs and this has been captured on photos and emblematically captured on many people's drawings. So whether it was bodies or shrapnel jamming the door -- it was inoperable.
There wasn't enough time between the first mine going off way ahead -- and then the Grad landing and setting the mine off near the bus, and exploding and jamming the door -- for any panicked person to have gotten out of the bus, walked into the field, and set off the mine -- which then ostensibly hit the bus.
Eventually, the driver or some soldiers was able to bring a ladder and set it against the bus to help people escape it. Colonel Cassad and others have claimed that the ladder leaning against the bus was some kind of means of walking over a mine field to deliberately set off one of the mines or some such nonsense -- but the ladder is explained quite matter-of-factly by the survivors: it helped them get out of a bus where the door was stuck.
That means that the theory that first the mine went off ahead, then someone stepped out can't work because the door is jammed at the moment of the explosion -- or seconds after (the video of the cars in line indicates this).
But let's return to those people clearly visible moving around by the side of the bus. Did they set off the mine, before other mines went off ahead? They may have been drivers who just stepped out for some air or a cigarette while waiting in this long line.
Ukraine@War has taken the exact same dashcam video, and made a different explanation for the people-- first he affirms that there are people, and adds that to his thesis that the DNR knew they would be hitting a long line of civilian cars and did so deliberately:
Then evidently after hearing that the pro-DNR explainers like Colonel Cassad are saying this is evidence that a panicked guy set off the mines, he provides a more amplified drawing to show that he was at least 12 meters away from the minefield:
So we have two conflicting explanations, and there certainly doesn't seem to be any proof from the video itself that a guy walked into a minefield. It is a blurry picture, however, and it might admit different readings.
There's yet another important factor to mitigate against the "mine-walker" theory, however, and again, the testimony of survivors. Here's the video of two of them:
These individuals appear to be credible because they don't appear to speak to any "versiya" or hypothesis. They are shaken, wounded, and their voices are strained and shaken as injured, shocked people would be expected to be. They naturally focus on their own wounds, and don't get into theorizing about missile directions and trajectories until asked. When asked, one man points toward Dokuachevsk and the DNR position, but he's not entirely sure -- he fumbles a bit but makes this conclusion. The other man only says that the right side of the bus was hit, not the left or front, consistent with the aftermath view and the position of the DNR.
None of the survivors say that "this idiot jumped out of our bus and ran into the mine field and killed or wounded us all" -- if that had happened, they would have told us. Neither of them say "We were idling by the side of the road, and one or two passengers got out for a smoke." They didn't note this at all. That pretty much clinches it for me. Even so, more investigation should be made of this issue of the people outside the bus before the explosion.
WHAT SURVIVORS HEARD - ONE EXPLOSION?
Col. Cassad also uses these individuals' testimony -- but selectively. He says that the first man only heard one explosion -- and then didn't hear anymore. That's why he thinks there is only one explosion of mines then, or an artillery shell, but no Grads. If there were three Grads, why didn't the man hear three explosions? Maybe it was only one Grad.
Cassad doesn't report the second part of what the man said, however, when he spoke of hearing the first explosion: that he was so deafened, and remains deaf now, that he didn't hear anything further.
The other man didn't hear more than one explosion, either, so maybe there is only one Grad or one artillery shell? Well, a rapid detonation, especially one near you and another many meters ahead of you, might be experienced as just one big sound -- we don't know. That bears investigation, but there are other ways to determine how many Grads there were or there were Grads at all.
Here's another video of the aftermath, showing Ukrainian soldiers going around looking at craters with pieces of Grad rockets in them. This video also shows the side of the bus up close, in which a pattern of holes can be seen.
@DaJeyPetros of Ukraine@War has a lengthy explanation about how Grad rocket damage can look here. He says that typically the damage is striated or in bands. He uses another attack in another area to point out this pattern:
Then he says the bus is in the same pattern:
I couldn't help thinking that there was a pattern like this in another incident in which no one claimed Grads were fired, and it was some other artillery shell:
In any event, this requires ballistics specialists who know what Grad damage looks like. OSCE SMM says they have conducted a thorough report - and it's the most thorough in the entire history of their mission, because when they tried to use this much attention on the Red Cross worker's killing in Donetsk, or School No. 63, they were forced to leave due to shelling. They were in DNR controlled territory as well, and access was not so forthcoming. Now they are in Ukrainian-controlled territory, and the Ukrainians are happy to let them in, because they believe the evidence will point to the DNR.
I don't know what more is needed after seeing this video with all the Grad craters AND hearing the SMM say they concluded that there are Grad craters -- and I hardly think it's likely the Ukrainian soldiers spent the night digging holes to look like Grad craters in the icy ground, and also sticking odd Grad rocket pieces in them.
And there's the original the OSCE Short-Term Mission report, which says traffic police confirmed to them that a Grad struck near the bus. Whose side are the traffic police on in this region? Whoever pays their salaries. But the fact that they said "Grad" when pro-Moscow bloggers were still saying "mines" lets us know there were likely Grads heard or seen.
GRADS FROM NORTH OR NORTHEAST?
Interestingly, on January 17, TASS reported that Amb. Andrei Kelin, the Russian representative to OSCE in Vienna, claimed that the OSCE monitors reported that the Grad came "from the north" and therefore could have been fired from a Ukrainian position.
The monitors didn't say anything about the direction in their first report at all:
In their next report, they did say north-northeast:
That means the Russian ambassador - who as a representative of one of the 57 member states of the OSCE would have seen the OSCE SMM report before it was published -- selectively picked only one direction out of it to report to the media.
But even TASS had to report that the document itself from OSCE SMM said north-northeast!
As Bellingcat has helpfully explained with a compass rose illustration -- north-northeast is not "either" "north" or "northeast" but in between north and northeast.
Why does this matter? Let's look at the map again:
To the north may be Ukrainian positions -- there's a Ukrainian checkpoint about 10 kilometers to the north. But there isn't a DNR position to the south, such that the Ukrainian forces would be firing on it. On the other hand, to the northeast is the Dokuchayevsk area from which @DaJeyPetros of Ukraine@War and other analysts are saying the Grad was launched. Here's the map Ukraine@War has:
Previously he had identified the Grad as coming from the northeast from the damage to the tree by the bus, and the crater at the road side. Then he took information from the chat in the Dokuchayevsk group about "Staraya Koloniya" which I put on Twitter on after discussing it with the Ukrainian Twitter user and mapping it out.
VK chat from poss launch site that hit Volnovakha bus names location Staraya Koloniya, describes Grads h/t @xuilolala pic.twitter.com/gQaG9WpttB
— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) January 15, 2015
He has another informant who has given him other possible launch positions, including from right within the complex of Staraya Koloniya (read here).
To the north are Ukrainian positions where there might be a Grad or other artillery. We'd have to accept a theory that involved the Ukrainian army turning around a Grad to point south, where there were only their own positions, instead of north-east, where there was a DNR position, to set up a false-flag operation and convince the European Parliament or other bodies to declare the DNR to be a terrorist group (the "Novorossiya" gang believe that was the motivation for the operation).
Kelin is not still pushing the theory that a Grad landed -- and the explosion up ahead scared the passenger into walking into the minefield. He's just saying a Grad came "from the north" and landed by the bus (and presumably set off some mines). But Colonel Cassad is. Perhaps they haven't gotten the memo that they don't need the "mine-walker" now if they have "the Grad from the North." That Kelin now has a Grad in the story (Cassad doesn't yet) lets us know that Moscow has to now accommodate reality concerning overwhelming evidence of the Grads -- but still has to figure out a way to take away the blame from the DNR.
There may be people who still find the picture too blurry and the "mine-walker" theory still compelling even so, but then they'd have to explain why survivors didn't describe any "mine-walkers" and what all these Grad parts are about.
In the original video, the soldier showed a crater that he said was "7 meters" from the bus -- that appeared also to be a Grad crater. The OSCE spot report says "12 meters". But if you don't want to look at maps and measure craters, listen to the victims -- and even a fake victim.
A FAKE VICTIM?
Another witness who has appeared has been denounced as fake -- and her main purpose may have been to support the "mine" version. She is shown with the name "Snezhana Karpeka" on the screen.
At 0:12 she holds up her bloodied passport to the camera at 0:12 and we can see that the name "Karpeka, Snezhana Anatolievna" is hand-written, with the year 1971 as the birthdate.
The woman in the passport photo has dark hair. Snezhana in the video has blonde or gray hair, but it could be dyed. She says the bus turns "not 90 degrees, but 60 degrees" -- although it's not clear why a bus standing in line is turning -- possible, as we see in the second video, it's to go around a cement road block, and possibly to pull over to the side of the road. To let some people out for a smoke? She doesn't say why.
She says the bus is hit, and she is knocked over, and the people sitting next to her are also knocked over. She may be pointing to the very back row of the bus -- it's not clear, as she is using the passport in her hand to illustrate the bus.
A deputy prosecutor is interviewed who says it was an anti-personnel mine. Next comes Aleksandr Manachinsky, military sciences expert from the Association for Systemic Analysis. He says there is absolutely no proof of any Grad missiles, and that it's a mine. He says he even has the impression that someone shot all along the side with a machine-gun. Next comes ta DNR representative who says it is a MON-50 or OZM-72 mine, and that the cylindrical shapes were found at the scene, 60 mm wide.
Then the narrator returns to Snezhana, who says she didn't hear a rocket, but heard a pop [khlopok] or clap, and just one, and that one pushed the bus to the side - and knocked out the windows.
TV1 has run a number of programs with the theory of the anti-personnel mine only and claimed that the lack of damage on the left side of the bus indicates it wasn't hit by a Grad -- had it been hit directly by a Grad, only a carcass or burnt-out frame would remain, not a relatively intact vehicle. Certainly we've seen buses end up that way, such as the hit of the bus near the bus stop on Kievskaya Street last summer (also attributed to the DNR forces, by the way).
But it's also possible the Grad hit the ground, made the crater, and set off the mines -- and threw off shrapnel from both the rocket and mines -- enough to kill 13 people, but leave the bus relatively intact.
The problem with Snezhana is that her name is not in the victims list, as Aric Toler pointed out. While it's always possible that there are more people than this list, because maybe there were more than 20 passengers and they didn't get all the information (they don't have the names of two military people on the bus). It doesn't seem likely that she is one of the two unnamed military people as it is more likely in Ukraine that these would be men, and she never claims to a be a soldier or policeman. There is one woman with the same patronymic of "Anatolievna," but she is born in 1983 -- too young.
There's even a parsing of whether the passport is real, as it doesn't show the perforations on a real Ukrainian passport, and whether the blood stains are faked, as real blood stains on a passport folded inside a purse or pocket would have identical matching stains on either side. I could point out that even if there is some issue with her name -- a married name versus a maiden name in the list or a mix-up -- there's no one even with a 1971 birthdate in the list, either.
So she is believed to be an actress working for the FSB and state TV, and that may not be her real name. LiveJournal blogger tyler78 was likely first to point this out, checked in Ukrainian directories and found there is such a person with such a name -- the only one in Ukraine -- and finds some indication that web pages were removed that had that name.
He found that name is also used by a supporter of an (in)famous Russian ultranationalist named Ivan Okhlobistan who is an actor in the Russian equivalent of "E.R." -- but the picture used on that now-deleted page, still in web cache (at least for now -- these disappear as I've confirmed again and again) was a woman with dark hair and a round face, not blond hair and a narrow face.
We don't even have to go to web caches for that, we can find her on a pro-"Novorossiya" page:
Yes, that woman doesn't look anything like the woman in the TV1 show -- her hair is dark and her face looks rounder and she looks much heavier. But then, Snezhana's passport picture also had dark hair and this woman looks like the passport picture -- the hair fringe and top of the head is similar.
Possibly, there is some identity theft going on here and this is a fake witness -- the woman in the passport matches the woman in the Okhlobistin fan group and the other "testimonials" for "Novorossiya" -- but isn't the woman in the TV1 broadcast at all.
And it may turn out that there is an additional wounded person verified beyond the list -- and this "Snezhana Karpeka" is that person, and she's real. It seems like the purpose of her testimony, however, might have been to bolster the "mine" story. She doesn't say anybody got out of the bus and walked over a mine, however, as Col. Cassad theorized.
Cassad is proud that he was first, then TV1 used his version; later the Russian ambassador uses only the "Grad from the north" theory and ditches the "mine-walker."
It seems likely she is fake for the simple reason that her name isn't in the injured persons' list -- but if she suddenly turns up as real, it doesn't matter. There is enough other evidence available to mitigate against the "only mines" story.
TV1 has run fakes before -- a mentally-ill man who was in a hospital was portrayed as a wounded foreigner and then a Ukrainian defecting to the DNR side before finally, in embarrassment, they had to explain that he was mentally disabled. Then there's the infamous story of the child crucifixion -- never proved and certainly faked - was the product of a woman refugee whose real name is Galina Pishnyak, who is the wife of a DNR fighter.
Some even wondered if Pishnyak was the same woman as Snezhena, proving she was the same kind of secret police actress as the notorious Odessa wailer -- who has doubled and tripled variously as the victim of a Right Sector pogrom in Odessa; a soldier's wife in Kiev, a widow, the owner of a roadside cafe in Stanitsa Luganskaya, etc. etc. in wildly divergently locations around Ukraine.
But they aren't the same person as they have different voices and ages. Pishnyak and her husband were said to have criminal records by the Ukrainian authorities; perhaps she believed her own story, to which she admits she was not an eye-witness or perhaps she collaborated willingly with Russian state TV to concoct the hoax, but it's unrelated to Volnovakha.
Why did TV1 use an actress when there were real victims already willing to speak on camera? Because their recollections of the event don't serve the narrative Moscow wants to push? But other witnesses who are available don't serve it completely either, even if they say they heard only one explosion sound.
FALSE-FLAG "DOCUMENTED PROOF"
The belief that this is an instigated Ukrainian false-flag operation dies very hard. There is even an anti-Maidan VKontakte group that has even come up with a document from the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) that purports to show that the SBU gave instructions to soldiers to make deliberate attacks on civilians to make it look like the DNR did it.
No doubt Ukrainians can point out what's fake about this purported document, but there's this: if the Ukrainian SBU were really going to set up such an operation, they wouldn't make a document and instructions on paper or in electronic form for this, as obviously that could end up in a VK group. When these types of things are done in the real world, they seldom have a written memorandum in triplicate to go with them. It's not plausible.
The DNR continues to write that the Ukrainians have fired on their own checkpoint to kill their own civilians. I won't throw out of hand the idea that either side "fires on their own" because likely we can find cases when either side has done this by mistake.
But to attack a checkpoint known not only to have lots of civilian cars by it, but minefields full of mines would take a particular kind of evil-mindedness and there simply isn't any evidence for this.
Could this evil-minded deliberate intent belong to the DNR? There are quite a few that believe so. The race to prove there was more than one Grad (which the Ukrainian soldier in fact told us in the very first hours in a video if we could have understood it) was part of this, because if there were more than 40 impacts, and more than 3 Grads all arriving in the same area, that would prove that at least three trucks were involved, or a combination of Grad trucks and artillery (another variant people have theorized) would mean a deliberate hit.
SOCIAL-MEDIA EVIDENCE OF DOKUCHAYEVSK FIRING POSITION
Many people put stake only in photos or videos of such incidents because they think only they can tell the truth impartially and digitally. But I think it's always very important to get the stories of eyewitnesses and survivors and knowledgeable people. Yes, they can be wrong in describing their own experience, as we have seen time and again as people clearly hit by rockets from the east or north east around Donetsk -- separatists' firing positions -- whose buildings have rocket damage and even rockets lodged in them showing the direction from whence they came, and they will wave their arms and say "It came from Pesky" -- the northwest -- because their television sets and the DNR that controls their territory have ingrained in them that all firing on civilians comes from Ukrainians. It most certainly does not.
In this case, we have a social network group, the Dokuchaevsk group on VKontakte, to give us more data. This is a town group made on the template VK uses to spawn groups for any location "Eto[ X], Detka" ("This is X, Kid") and then sometimes the nick-name of the town, which in this case is "Dokuch".
These groups are used often by people to find out basic information about services, i.e. "where can I get my car repaired?" or about bus schedules or routes "how can I get to Dokuchaevsk from X?". These groups can contain actual locals as well as people who used to live there who want to keep in touch.
Increasingly, these kinds of groups are used to find out whether a rocket has hit a building, and whether people are alive or injured in them. Indeed, this group had been used for that purpose in the days before January 13.
On January 13, there are a number of alarmed posts in the afternoon and evening. As people began to look for social media evidence of the Grads, an anonymous account appeared with few followers who pointed out the exact pages of the Dokuchayevsk group.
I talked to him extensively because the claim that these people were in fact stating the Grads were fired from where they lived wasn't self-evident. It required local knowledge of a location not marked on Google Maps or Yandex map called "Staraya Koloniya" -- it means "Old Colony" and evidently the name for both fields and a housing complex. Here it is on Wikimapia.
The locals call this area "Starukha," which is also the Russian word for "old lady". So it wasn't clear when they used this word whether they were talking about an old lady's house or an old lady who was a neighbour, or this place. But you can tell by their verbal construction "na starukhe" which doesn't mean "on the old lady" which wouldn't make sense but means "at Staraya Koloniya".
That the Russian-backed fighters fire off Grad missiles in the back yards of housing complexes takes absolutely no stretch of the imagination as they've been caught doing this dozens of times on tape by citizen reporters. Here are some examples of such reckless firing in December, outside of Donetsk.
So on January 13, you can see what people were talking about: Grads fired from their apartment complex, door handles and windows rattling and so on.
This Twitter user named @xuilolala -- (a name which is taken from a ribald song about Putin that Ukrainians sing) makes the point that one of the statements of a woman named Olga in the group about a Grad rocket firing from where she was comes at 2:26 i.e. 14:26, just 2 minutes after the time stamp on the second video of the security camera:
@666_mancer обрати внимание на время в ролике и на время в скриншоте. вот и ответ - откуда стреляли. pic.twitter.com/2bYB2DMSru
— путен XУЙЛO (@xuilolala) January 14, 2015
Translation: Note the time on the video and the time on the screenshot. There is the answer where the shooting was from.
By "on the screenshot," he means this:
I confirmed that these statements were there at the link claimed in that group, and took screenshots and translated them. Note that because I'm in a different time zone, the times show up different within VK. I didn't translate everything because not all of it is relevant or understandable without context requiring many other comments -- but that's easily enough done if someone wants to spend the time.
Olga has since deleted her chat -- but it was there, I saw it myself and made a screenshot.
WHERE IS OLGA?
I do have to ask how Olga, who listed her location on VK not as Dokuchayevsk, but another town, and has recent pictures on her account of that town (which I have copies of), was able to say anything about Dokuchayevsk. The answer is likely simply that she has relatives there that she visited over the holidays. She likely deleted her comment out of fear of retaliation against them or her or simply because she didn't like being in the glare of international publicity. Even so, this lack of confirmation that she was in the location of the Grads, and her deletion of her comment, mean we have to find more corroboration. A journalist or investigator can write me for more information.
No one seems to have filmed the Grads themselves going off from Dokuchayevsk, although there is a new video showing the sounds of the Grads at Ukraine@War, from which a position can be drawn.
I think it's safe to say that if you have multiple people speaking about this event in the Dokuch social group, as a firing and as an explosion sound where they are -- in or near Staraya Koloniya, it happened as stated.
UPDATE: FURTHER SOCIAL MEDIA INDICATE OF SEEING GRAD FROM DOKUCHAEVSK
The local time is around 15:00 -- it shows 20:00 (8:00 pm) because of my time zone.
NOVAYA GAZETA REPORT
There's another important account from a local which was obtained by Pavel Kanygin, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta who himself has been a "guest" of the "DNR Hotel" -- the basement prison of the old SBU building in Slavyansk where he was kept hostage -- and considers he was lucky to emerge alive. He has consistently provided clear and helpful reporting on Russia's war against Ukraine. His account is published by Novaya Gazeta.
Here's my translation of some relevant passages:
The prosecutor's office of the Donetsk Region has characterized the shelling of the bus as a terrorist attack, placing the blame on DNR forces. According to information from the prosecutor's office, the separatists carring out "a targeted strike with the use of the Grad system of explosive volley fire, using more than 40 shells." Vyacheslav Abroskin, head of the police of the Donetsk Region controlled by the central Ukrainian authorities, had stated that the separatists were involved in the tragedy.
[...]
"The bus was traveling from Zlatoustovka to Donetsk," a local resident told Novaya. "The last Ukrainian checkpoint was at Volnovakha. Further on are Ukrainian positions. But then Elenovka begins and immediately after that there's a DNR checkpoint near Dokuchayevsk, where the DNR positions are located -- there are artillery and Grads there. The direct distance from Dokuchayevks to Volnovakha is 20 kilometers."
Yes, we have the video showing the direction in which the bus is pointing and yes, we have the security video from the checkpoint showing the bus on the road, but it's also good to have other evidence that this bus was headed north, en route to Donetsk -- this is also corroborated by the second video which shows the left side of the bus and the cardboard sign in the window that states "Zlatoustivkha-Donetsk" (using the Ukrainian spelling)-- these are all good details to have in an environment where hostile forces are claiming the scene is "set-up".
What's most important about Kanygin's interview with the prosecutor -- which I couldn't find on the record anywhere else in Ukrainian media for some reason -- is that he said there were more than 40 Grads.
And what's most important from the eye-witness account is that the person says there is a DNR checkpoint at Dokuchayevsk, and they are known to have Grads there.
SO WHERE ARE THE UKRAINIAN AND DNR POSITIONS?
This witness said that "further on" there were Ukrainian positions. I don't know exactly where those are from Ukrainian sources, and there is an aggressive contingent online who believe these should never be publicized, and that the demand of some Ukrainian military never to publicize them should be heeded. Of course, the Ukrainians themselves publicize their whereabouts and also hand out maps every day. They aren't as detailed as the "Novorossiya" maps, however, regarding the front line. I don't think journalists or bloggers can be expected to adhere to these restrictions but this is a matter of debate.
Military Maps, the pro-Russian site, has maps of the area from which we can learn one important fact: there isn't any claim that there were Ukrainian artillery or Grad trucks by this Volnovakha checkpoint, and there isn't any claim that shelling occurred from this checkpoint on that day or the days before. The map also shows you the DNR position in Dokuchayevsk, in case you still didn't believe that after everything else supplied.
Here's the checkpoint itself, which is here on Google Maps and is shown here on their maps:
All that's there is the bus that was hit, and the minefield.
Here's a broader zoom out:
This shows it is Ukrainian territory, from the perspective of Russia.
So what could the Russian-backed separatists in a Grad firing position be aiming at? Perhaps it is at the tank and artillery at a checkpoint about 10 km north? It's not clear if that existed before January 13, or, if judging from a "Novorossiya" report, Grads were brought in by Ukrainian forces AFTER the bus attack, to retaliate.
That night, at 19:00, after the bus shelling which occurred at 14:26, the Ukrainian forces fired at the Dokuchayevsk position. They were said to fire Grad missiles, according to the pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian Military Maps.
Had they shot at this position before?
Before the Volnovakha bus shelling, there was a theater destroyed in Dokuchayevsk. Was that hit by the separatists or the Ukrainians?
Could the separatists aimed at the other checkpoint and missed by 10 kilometers? That's a huge distance! But Grads are very reckless and indiscriminatory and specialists always say that this weapon is not precise.
But...10 kilometers imprecise?
Human Rights Watch's researchers have consistently singled out Ukraine for attacks on civilians and the use of Grad missiles in particular, saying that using them in civilian areas "may constitute a war crime" because they are imprecise. Will they be willing to say the same about what appears to be a DNR attack with Grad missiles?
The "Novorossiya" press isn't claiming there aren't any rockets fired; instead, they are taking another tack, which is to say that a mine went off -- because someone walked into it.
A NOVOROSSIYA ADMISSION OF DNR GUILT
Interestingly, this pro-Novorossiya site says after looking at the video evidence that most likely the DNR is at fault, and they should admit it and punish those responsible. That's how threadbare the story is! (That site, like others, use pictures from another bus -- that is not how the seats look as we can see from the very first video.) This blogger calls it "a tragic mistake by the militia" -- which is the term for the DNR or Russian-backed fighters.
And Purgin, the DNR representative, is forced to say that the Ukrainians deliberately shot their own bus full of civilians because he has no better ideas. He says the Volnovakha checkpoint is deep within enemy territory behind their rear guard and is of no interest to the DNR as a military target.
More research is needed of battle reports to try to figure out what the DNR thought they were firing at; whether they made a mistake; whether they deliberately fired on a long line of civilian vehicles at a checkpoint that had no artillery based around it (that they knew about or had mapped).
OSCE INVESTIGATION
The OSCE is opting to have an investigation of this incident performed by the JCCC. That has not inspired confidence, because the Russian military is part of the JCCC and they are not only aiding one side in the conflict, their military is taking part in it themselves. That they are a side in the conflict isn't something to speculate or try to prove through bloggers' accounts; it's proven by the fact that Russia is a party to the Minsk talks to bring about a peace settlement.
To be sure, what the OSCE Short-term Monitoring Mission also said -- a point that has been lost sight of -- is that it will also perform its own investigation independent of the JCCC investigation.
Now that OSCE SMM has released an ambiguous report that says "north-northeast," it's hard to know if they will go further. OSCE is now chaired by Serbia, a close ally of Russia. We may not get anything better than this; the JCCC report may be worse. At least the possibility of "northeast" -- Dokuchayevsk -- is thereby admitted.
I could note here that a sorely missing element of OSCE is the old capacity of ODIHR to conduct human rights investigations in zones of armed conflict -- in their day, ODIHR experts conducted crucial investigations and issues reports on Kosovo and Chechnya and other areas ,but that day has long past. Russia has attacked and eviscerated the capacity of ODIHR to function in this fashion, as we have watched happen in the last 10 years -- and sometimes with European acquiesence.
INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS
Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International may attempt to investigate this incident, but their credibility has eroded as most of their reports and advocacy throughout this war have been about claims of Ukrainian-caused atrocities and demands that Ukraine stop using heavy artillery in civilian areas. To be sure, there are also some reports and some occasional willingness to concede that insufficient evidence is available to charge Ukrainians with shelling and that it might be the fault of the Russian-backed separatists.
HOW WILL THE TRUTH BE FOUND?
Because the international human rights groups, with their fixation on states and their responsibility for international law, and their less willingness to hold non-state actors to account in the same way, ostensibly due to a lack of legal framework, tend toward this bias, maybe some would welcome their findings on Volnovakha then as all the more compelling -- if they find the DNR culpable. As I've explained, due to their tendency to look at shrapnel, on-site damage and victims' wounds and testimonies rather than to examine firing positions, they may not go further.
It seems unlikely that we will ever get any full report out of the OSCE given the need to accommodate Russia precisely in order to involve Russia in a peace settlement -- the bane of OSCE that some might say is still its boon.
Among the reasons that "crowd-sourced" conflict reporting has emerged is because international institutions like the UN or OSCE don't do their jobs -- they accommodate warring parties like Russia. And it's also because frankly international NGOs are selective as well, and won't report on conflict except from the confined framework of international humanitarian law, which in their hands, tends to be biased against states and permissive toward non-state actors. Conflict reporters bring a new moral dimension and social-media authenticity and immediacy to this work missing before, which is biased in its own way for other reasons, but is a welcome contribution.
Ultimately, the people who live in this region and those who immediately suffered from this attack will have to find the truth and cope with it as best as they can. Hopefully, more local journalists and NGOs can interview a fuller set of victims, find out what kind of wounds they have, find out whether they have Grad parts of mine parts, and find out whether any of them can comment on the "mine-walker". And perhaps some journalists will even be able to get information from the Ukrainian army about where its positions were exactly in the north, and what they had in those positions to fire with.
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