This article was initially posted as a thread on Twitter.
The missile that killed, according to reports, at least 50 people at the Kramatorsk train station has been immediately denounced as a Russian war crime without any investigation. But there are grounds for questioning this conclusion.
The New York Times reports that “President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russia had hit the station with what he identified as a Tochka-U short-range ballistic missile...”
The Russian Defense Ministry has denied the charge, stating that Tochka-U missiles are used by the Ukrainian military. This is certainly true. An article posted by the web publication “1945” on March 30 is headlined: “Tochka: The Missile Ukraine Could Use to Attack Russia?”
Author Brent M. Eastwood, 1945’s Defense and National Security editor, reported that “the Ukrainians have their own short-range ballistic missile called the Tochka that is starting to make its presence known.” The report continues:
The Tochka specializes in destroying buildings and the Ukrainians may have used it to pulverize a structure that housed pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk in a strike that killed 23 people on March 14.
The Ukrainians denied that they fired the missile. However, the Russians also claimed that they had shot down another Tochka missile on March 19. Whatever the truth of the allegations and denials, the Ukrainians, Eastwood writes, have between 90 and 500 missiles.
Another significant piece of information provided by Eastwood is that the Ukrainian Tochka missiles “are deployed in Donbas and in the south of the country.” Kramatorsk is located in the Donbas region.
The fact that the Ukrainian military has an arsenal of Tochka missiles—and that such a missile was used in an attack last month (mostly ignored by the US media) that killed 23 ethnic Russians in Donetsk—does not prove that Ukraine fired the missile that hit Kramatorsk.
But it is entirely possible—even probable—that the Ukrainian military, with its ruthless fascist contingents, launched the attack, knowing that it will fuel the atrocity propaganda that is playing such an important role in NATO’s war against Russia.
The release of photos of a missile part with the handwritten Russian-language message, “for the children,” is a strong indication that the attack on the station was staged for propaganda purposes. It is all but unbelievable that the Russian military would place such a provocative and self-incriminating message, in the midst of the furor over the Bucha incident, on a missile that it planned to fire into a crowd of innocent civilians. What rational purpose would this serve? And who cannot believe that the discovery of this missile part, with the perfectly legible inscription, is too much of a coincidence?
The Ukrainian regime has a carte blanche to do whatever it wants, because the media will immediately, and without any investigation, blame the Russians.