17.02.2022, Lugansk.
In the morning of February 17, information about the shelling of Stanytsa Luganskya by the servicemen of the Lugansk People’s Republic began to appear in the Ukrainian media and on social networks. It was stated that a kindergarten had come under fire.
The reports also included photos. One of them showed a picture of the building from the outside, while others showed a view of the kindergarten from the inside with a destroyed wall and bricks mixed in with children’s toys.
On the account of the Operation United Forces (as the Kiev authorities call the punitive operation in Donbass) there was a message, which reported that two civilians were injured as a result of the shelling. Half of the village was left without power.
Later, the National Police of Ukraine published a video showing the evacuation of children and teachers from a kindergarten and a destroyed room.
Reaction of Kiev’s official
An interesting fact was that several foreign journalists – Elliot Higgins, Christofel Miller and Michael Horowitz – quickly reported the shelling on Twitter.
Later, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitriy Kuleba also tweeted about the incident. He called on partners to sharply condemn “Violations of the Minsk agreements by Russia, which have already led to a tense situation.”
President Vladimir Zelensky, who is just now in the zone of the Ukrainian militants’ operation, also made a statement. He called the “shelling of a kindergarten by pro-Russian forces” a large-scale provocation. The politician called on diplomats and OSCE inspectors to stay in Ukraine so they could record violations.
War correspondents’ assessment
On the other side of the front, however, the assessment of what happened is different. First, Russian war correspondents working in Donbass reacted to the information. Aleksandr Kots, a journalist for Komsomolskaya Pravda, noted the strangeness of the published photos.
He noted that he has seen many times similar shelling of schools and kindergartens in Donbass. “Only in reality after the impact [there is] broken glass under the wall, the walls and asphalt are speckled with hundreds of shrapnel. But here neither of these,” the military correspondent said.
Kots said that in his opinion, the tank was shot at the wall with a bolt, which penetrated the wall but did not explode, and that resulted in such a strange nature of the damage.
Military expert Vladimir Orlov on his Telegram channel also noted the strangeness of the shelling. First, he noted that the distance from the building to the contact line is more than eight kilometers, so neither mortars nor anti-tank guided missiles could reach the wall.
“If we look at the straight line from the so-called point of impact in the kindergarten to the contact line, there are very dense residential buildings that simply prevents any hit,” the expert pointed out to the second oddity.
He called what happened a crude fake that was created by employees of the Center for Information and Psychological Operations of Ukraine.
Reaction of the Lugansk People’s Republic
The LPR authorities also agree with this assessment. Rodion Miroshnyk, a representative of the republic in the political subgroup of the contact group for the settlement of the situation in the eastern Ukraine, noted these oddities and said that “Kiev has prepared not only provocative shelling, but also information fakes about their consequences!”
Yan Leshchenko, chief of the People’s Militia of the republic, also accused the Ukrainian side of spreading disinformation. “In the photos published by Ukrainian propagandists, one can observe serious destruction of the walls, while the glazing of the building is completely intact. Anyone who has ever seen the damage to buildings from real shelling will tell you that these are staged photos,” he stressed.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
