KYIV – Nine Russian officers led a shelling operation of Mariupol on January 24, 2015, that killed 30 civilians and injured over 100 more, United Kingdom-based Bellingcat investigative group reported on May 7.
The open-data sleuths identified one Russian general, two colonels, and three lieutenant colonels who allegedly “instructed, directed and supervised” the rocket attack.
Moscow has denied direct involvement in the Donbas war – which has killed over 10,300 people since April 2014 and displaced up to 2 million people – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The Donetsk Oblast city of Mariupol, a strategic port city on the Azov Sea, is 30 kilometers west of the frontline.
Russian-led forces “initially announced they were advancing on the city, then backtracked and blamed Ukrainian forces,” the Associated Press reported on May 7.
“This investigation was made possible due to access to raw video and audio data that is being submitted by the Ukrainian government to the International Court of Justice as part of an ongoing legal case,” Bellingcat reported, adding that a full report on the investigation will be published later this month.
The group has previously published reports on the Donbas war, including the fatal downing of a Malaysian airliner in 2014 that killed all 298 people on board over Russian-held territory in easternmost Ukraine.
Between 2,500 and 10,000 regular Russian soldiers are in the occupied parts of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, President Petro Poroshenko told CBS News in a May 7 interview.
“Plus they have almost 50,000 troops, so-called ‘Russian volunteers’ who were mobilized by the Russian Federation and delivered there,” he added. “They pretend they are not the soldiers of the regular army. But they are Russian nationals and Russian soldiers. They use Russian weapons and ammunition. They are Russians.”