KYIV – Russia extensively used cross-border artillery fire against Ukrainian military targets in July-September 2014 in what are considered “acts of war,” according to a new report by Bellingcat, a group of citizen journalists who use open-source investigation tools and techniques, that was released on December 21. Numbering in the “thousands,” the report says, the cross-border projectiles were the “first and strongest evidence of a direct Russian participation in the fighting.” Although they were already proven to have occurred by Ukrainian officials and the U.S. government, the new report analyzed the extent to which they were used in the summer of 2014, when they largely contributed to stemming a Ukrainian counterattack to retake the border areas near Russia, and cut off and surround the occupied Donbas capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk. In total, at least 279 separate artillery attacks likely were fired inside Russia, targeting 408 Ukrainian military sites in the “entire border area of the conflict zone.”
Using recent additions of satellite imagery to Google Earth, Yandex and Bing map services, Bellingcat said it found evidence of Russian artillery fire in 2014 “to a much fuller extent.” It found that weapons such as howitzers and multiple rocket-launcher systems were used and, based on other open-source evidence, said that “allows for direct attribution of responsibility to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”
Despite mounting evidence, Moscow authorities have consistently denied direct involvement in the Donbas war that has killed nearly 10,000 people and uprooted more than 1.7 million from their homes since April 2014. Instead, the Kremlin has attempted to portray the war as a civil conflict between Ukrainian government forces and indigenous pro-Russian separatists. The open-source investigative group found that Russia’s artillery barrages “escalated” in “magnitude” the more Ukraine’s offensive in summer 2014 succeeded to liberate occupied territory.
