EPA
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NOS News•today, 07:44
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David van Hulzen
editor OSINT
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Miral de Bruijne
editor Abroad
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David van Hulzen
editor OSINT
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Miral de Bruijne
editor Abroad
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Dozens were killed and injured in a rocket attack on a shopping center in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk on Monday. It is the umpteenth time in the country that civilians have been killed in a rocket attack on a non-military target. It theater in Mariupol, the railway station van Kramatorsk, hospitals spread across the country, and Friday a apartment building and two holiday camps near Odessa are just a few examples.
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“I would like to remind you of the president’s words that Russian forces do not shell civilian targets,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the latest shelling. And there was no attack on a shopping center in Kremenchuk either, the Russians claim. Ukrainian President Zelensky and the West say Russia is lying.
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In the hours and days after the attack, reactions and images followed each other steadily. What do we know and what not? Watch the video:
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video-player">
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Zoomed in: the information war surrounding the missile attack in Kremenchuk
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“Suppose that Russian soldiers wanted to shoot at an arms depot, then that is in principle a military target,” begins lecturer in international criminal law Marieke de Hoon of the University of Amsterdam. “But even then a thorough analysis must be made of possible civilian deaths, and such a bombardment should not be carried out if the chance is too great.”
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War crime
Russia claims the mall fire was caused by a secondary explosion. “The video images disprove that, but even then it would most likely be a war crime,” says De Hoon. “Apparently the mall was so close that they shouldn’t have attacked the supposed weapons depot at all.”
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Russia’s claim that the mall was out of order was previously debunked by research platform Bellingcat. This is how customers shared online receipts of the morning of the attack.
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The fact that the shelling happened in broad daylight is an additional factor, according to De Hoon. “If Russia was really convinced that this was an arms depot, they could have carried out the attack at night, for example. The chance of civilian deaths at a shopping center is then considerably smaller.”
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Inaccurate Weapons
Two days after the attack suggested British intelligence that there is “a realistic possibility” that the missile attack was not intended for the mall. It has been suggested for some time that Russia has run out of precision weapons and is therefore deploying less accurate missiles. In this case, according to the same intelligence services, anti-ship missiles of the Kh-32 type, which are not suitable for hitting ground targets accurately. “Certainly in urban areas,” writes the British Ministry of Defense. “This significantly increases the chance of additional damage.”
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That is also an argument to view the rocket attack in Kremenchuk as a war crime, says De Hoon. “The closer bombings take place to civilian objects, the more accurate the equipment has to be. If we run out of precision weapons, that’s no excuse.”
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