On January 24, 2015, Mariupol was shelled from the east, writes Mariupol blogger, Maksym Borodin, after conducting his own investigation.
He writes the following:
“I am a resident of Mariupol. And I am in favor of objectivity. When I have doubts about something, I check it out for myself.
Based on all of the information presently available, a conclusion can be made that on January 24, 2015, the Eastern District of Mariupol was shelled from the east, and probably from the northeast. This was confirmed by my friends who live in this residential area and came under fire. This was also confirmed by my friends who were there just after the shelling, who observed the remains of Grad shells in the ground, and who could see which side of the high-rise buildings were damaged after direct hits.”
Russian propagandists Dmitry Stieshin and Aleksandr Kots publicly announced that the DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic) attacked Mariupol.
On the evening of January 23, Dmitry Stieshin wrote: “Very nice. Troops of Novorossia launched an all-out attack”.
On January 24, shortly after the shelling of the Eastern District, Stieshin wrote: “The left bank of Mariupol right now. It is rumored that [the Ukrainian regiment] “Azov” has run away from the city somewhere. Panic. The second direction of the attack is determined.”
Here, Kots reports about the “counterattack” on Mariupol: “Mariupol right now. The counterattack is going on.”
Stieshin spread panic by announcing “militia men in the residential area of Eastern District:” “We have just called to Mariupol. Militia men are already in 9-storey buildings on the north-eastern outskirts.”
The same day, continuing the spread of fear, the head of the self-proclaimed DPR, Alexander Zakharchenko, made a speech and announced the attack on Mariupol.
http://lifenews.ru/news/148868
Numerous reports of local authorities and Ukrainian military fleeing the city were thrown onto social networks. (For more details about this, click here.)
This doesn’t seem to warrant further comment. Militants and their commanders PUBLICLY admitted their involvement in the events that transpired in Mariupol.
UNTIL THEY CHANGED THEIR STORY
When it became clear that they had failed to wreak havoc on the city and provoke the mass evacuation of its residents, especially by the local authorities and military, and when it became clear that it was civilians who were injured, the militants changed their story. They quickly denied attacking Mariupol and accused the Ukrainian Army of shelling its own citizens.
The following headlines illustrate perfectly how militants were changing their versions throughout the day.
What happened on January 24, as with the downing of the Malaysian airliner and the shelling of the bus in Volnovakha, fits a perfect pattern.
This would seem comical, if not for the horrible consequences of these tragedies. The OSCE mission confirmed the eastern and north-eastern directions of the shelling. (To view the complete report, click here).
The OSCE also confirmed repeated shelling from the eastern direction after 1:00 p.m. This time, shells crashed near a roadblock manned by the Ukrainian military. This shows that the militants were still trying to intimidate the residents of Mariupol, even at this point. Yet social networks were now flooded with messages that it was the Ukrainian army that had fired upon the city. The accounts regarding the direction of the shelling were now completely altered. It was initially said that the Ukrainian army fired over the whole city from the Old Crimea district, situated on the other end of the city in the north-western direction. Then it was reported that the firing was from Sartana and Talakovka, which are situated to the north. The final version claimed that the Ukrainian army fired from the adjoining village of Vynogradne. Texts ran like this: “Ukrops got drunk and made wrong calculations.” Or: “Old Ukrop’s missiles did not make it to militia men.”
Those prone to conspiracy theories were particularly excited by the fact that an hour before the mass shelling, electrical, heating, and water-supply systems were shut down in the Eastern District. But the explanation is simple and logical: with the first shell explosions at 8:00 a.m., two high-voltage lines were damaged; and as a result, these systems went down.
Sorting through these crazy information trails is a job for psychiatrists. However, I would like to investigate one particular throw that was later refuted by me personally. Its authors are Dmitriy Stieshin and Aleksandr Kots, notorious journalists/propagandists of Russia’s military aggression. Since Sloviansk, it’s been clear that these two will say anything. But let’s get back to the article.
Click here to read.
Summing up the content, we could notice that the authors deliberately omitted the report of the OSCE about Mariupol shelling on January 24. Instead they put a focus on the OSCE report about the last shelling of Donetsk, where the NORTH-WESTERN direction was mentioned! Instead of the OSCE report and play-by-play videos made by local residents they addressed to their colleague, propagandist from REN-TV, Valentin Trushinin. Here is his “couch investigation”. At present moment this “masterpiece of guesswork on the freeze-frame from 720p video” was reposted almost 2,000 times. Trushinin used as a basis the video of Azov regiment. Their cameraman came to the place of the tragedy almost right after the shelling. We are interested in the fragment of the video concerning the school No 5 in Eastern District. Let’s move to the position 8:35. Let’s pick out freeze-frames from the video.
The sign over the entrance.
The entrance to the school courtyard.
The courtyard and the site of missile crash.
Zoomed-in freeze-frame of the shell crater.
Considering the hasty shooting by the cameraman and the low quality of the video, either Trushinin did not notice the crater, but only a black spot and the fragment dispersion, or he pretended not to notice.
His “investigation” is entirely predicated upon fragment dispersion and a low-quality video.
Nevertheless, he is certain that the missile came from the north-west, (meaning from Old Crimea).
After I read this account in “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” I reviewed the video fragment of the Azov video. Upon closer examination, it became clear that the journalist was almost certainly incorrect and that the missile had in fact come from the other direction.
When I had a break in helping residents of the Eastern district, I decided to go to the school myself.
Let’s take a look at my video. Out of habit I kept a mobile with a compass a little bit uneven. To the end of the video I made it even. But nevertheless we can see that the explosion is almost parallel to the northern and southern walls.
The second video is without the compass, but offers more detail.
Now let’s look at the photos.
More photos from another device.
I believe that my videos and photos make it clear that the Grad missile came from the east. And it is common for such missiles to disperse some of its fragments FROM THE DIRECTION OF ITS ORGIN. There was a similar situation with the Grads that shelled Volnovakha. In my opinion, it is because the main mass of charge and fragments are not in the head of the missile, but in the middle part. Thus, such fragment dispersion is quite natural in this situation. Here is a modest diagram.
Now that we have judged the direction of the missile, we can draw an approximate line of the shelling.
Here is a perspective of the line of the school shelling from the east.
We can clearly see the direction from Novoazovsk. Even if missiles sometimes crashed more to the south or to the north, it is quite plausible with the vector of the dispersion. Now let’s draw a line for the theoretically possible shelling from the villages of Sartana and Talakovka.
In this case the inlet angle is completely different.
Now let’s try the variant of shelling from Vynogradne.
Again the inlet angle is absolutely different, and an almost impossible inlet angle for the missile when firing from such short range.
Let’s investigate the variant of shelling from Old Crimea that the propagandists insisted on.
Does anyone doubt the direction of the shelling anymore?
And something more.
The same situation repeats itself with the site of another missile crash near the school No 5, at Olimpiyska Street, 165.
The missile came parallel to the building No 165, also from the east.
Here are some photos.
And this is the direct hit to the building No 165 from the eastern direction.
If you have any doubts about the direction of the shelling and you happen to be a resident of Mariupol, simply go and see for YOURSELVES!
As of now, no play-by-play video has shown any other possible direction for the missiles crashing, though in the past days people have able to record the damage and missile orientations.
Source: Maksym Borodin’s blog
