The Grad firing of a regular bus near Volnovakha, Ukraine, is officially recognized as an act of terrorism: 12 dead and 18 wounded. On Sunday, January 18, a solidarity march can be held at Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev, because of the murder of Ukrainian civilians at the firing of the bus.
However, the analysis of pictures shows that it was not a fire from a Grad system, as Kiev asserts. There are no traces of a blast wave in the bus. Even a few windows remained intact and the slopes were not broken. There are no traces of piercing the left side with glass shards. Yet the right side was densely dotted with round holes. There is a suspicion that it is an act of terrorism but on the part of Ukraine . Judging by the nature of damages, the bus was hit by one or more directional fragmentation mines laid along the road. Andrei Koshkin, an expert of the Military Political Scientists Association, agreed to comment on the situation in an interview to Pravda.Ru.
"Now the both parties suggest their versions of the attack on the civilian bus. Representatives of voluntary military forces claim that as to an artillery strike their nearest artillery systems are out of range, while Kiev right away began to disseminate information that it was done by members of volunteer corps. New circumstances of the incident are coming to light, say, there was no artillery strike and people were shot with small arms. A question of the beneficiary arises. I'm far from the idea that members of volunteer corps staged the shooting of civilians by their raiding force to present it as a political farce and declare that the government violates the terms of the truce," Andrei Koshkin says.
As the expert stated, the OSCE recorded more than 150 violations of the truce by the fire from both directions. Yesterday alone there were 66 gun battles. "I assume that it is the fault of subunits known as members of punitive squads that do not come under the command of Kiev, such as the Azov and Dnepr battalions, which are ready to worsen the situation at the border between voluntary military forces and Ukrainian regular forces, and such style is typical to them."
As Andrei Koshkin noted, there remains no doubt that Ukraine has been preparing its armed forces all the while for a serious intrusion into the territory of the south-east. During the truce, artillery systems and other sophisticated weaponry were supplied, now 4 waves of mobilization have been announced to call 220,000 people to active service in the south-east. As the expert emphasized, incidents like this one are necessary to justify such measures.
The correspondent of Pravda.Ru asked the expert why the UN Security Council that condemned the shooting of the bus did not condemn murders in the territory under control of voluntary military forces.
"It's a typical tendency during the entire civil ware. All fire attacks on the civilian population are hardly recorded by the OSCE and are practically ignored by the UN. We can observe an extreme selectivity in favour of current Kiev authorities, who are supported and supervised by the USA. Regretfully, we can suppose that the tendency will continue until serious and fundamental changes in the governmental structure of Ukraine," Andrei Koshkin says.
Pravda.Ru notes that Russia urged the OSCE to investigate the tragedy. But there is a suspicion that the case will be hushed up like the Boeing case.
"Yes, we know the worth of declarations to investigate everything by the example of the Odessa tragedy, Maidan snipers, and firings of civilian districts with prohibited weapons. We all heard such declarations, but there are no effective results. We even know a story when journalists named those people who probably shot down the Boeing. But they were not even interrogated. Foreign mass media said there were no grounds to discuss such news hook in mass media abroad. We can see a prominent tendency of suppression and selectivity in favour of current Kiev authorities, who act with the support of the European Union and the USA. All that is directly or indirectly stacked against Russia," Koshkin concluded.
Pravda.Ru
Translation provided by TNC Freelancer Group