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The Tribunal for Putin (T4P) global initiative was set up in response to the all-out war launched by Russia against Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia boasts of “strike objectives achieved’ as death toll rises from missile strikes on Ukraine’s main children’s hospital, other civilian targets

09.07.2024   
Halya Coynash
While the official line is that Russia did not bomb the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital on 8 July, nor any other target, pro-Kremlin social media is actively pushing various lies, or openly gloating

After the missile strike on Okhmandyt Children’s Hospital

After the missile strike on Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital

Russia’s missile attacks on the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital and numerous other civilian sites in Kyiv and other cities on 8 July are so far known to have killed 43 civilians (including 4 children) and injured 190 others.  The real number is likely to be higher as it is not clear how many people were trapped under the rubble.  Another terrible price will be paid by the youngest of Russia’s victims, as the missile strike on Okhmatdyt, Ukraine’s main children’s hospital, destroyed an entire toxicology ward and young children had to be taken off dialysis machines, while cancer patients were forced to sit near the ruins, waiting for help to arrive. 

The official Russian defence ministry line appeared early in the day and remains unchanged.  Its mass strikes on 8 July were, purportedly, aimed at and hit “military targets’.  “The objectives of the strike were achieved, the military hit all intended targets”. “The statements by representatives of the Kyiv regime about deliberate strikes on civilian targets are not true”.

So that settles that.  Except that these are not mere statements from the so-called ‘Kyiv regime’, but reports on all international media whose representatives are now largely present in Kyiv and were able to see exactly which targets Russia hit.

Worth noting that Russia only goes into denial mode when international outrage makes it expedient to do so, and when, as on this occasion, when multiple countries have demanded an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council regarding the attack.  Russia launched over 40 missiles on Monday morning with the death toll in Kryvy Rih particularly high.  The scale and the strike on Okhmatdytled to such international attention, but Russia is carrying out strikes on a virtually daily basis in different parts of the country, with very many of these targeting residential buildings, schools and an already huge number of hospitals.

This new war crime comes almost exactly ten years after a Russian BUK missile, transported from a military site in Russia, downed Malaysian airliner MH17 over occupied Donbas, killing 298 passengers and crew, including 80 children.  Then Moscow understood swiftly enough that official denials would not be sufficient, especially given Russian propaganda channels having initially boasted of a Russian-controlled militant downing of a ‘Ukrainian military plane’, and Russian launched a huge disinformation campaign.  This included a record-breaking Twitter campaign in which 65 thousand tweets, all trying to shift the blame to Ukraine, were posted in 48 hours.  Any ‘version’ would do, as long as it blamed others, not Moscow.

Here the range may seem limited, the video footage too damning for such denial, but the same methods are being applied. 

Detector Media has probed pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and even found the bizarre claim that this was “an attempt to torpedo Viktor Orban’s peace mission”. While the official Moscow line is that nothing bad happened, and Russia only hit the planned ‘military targets’, bloggers and those running anonymous Telegram channels are coming out with other claims. 

The kind of default assertion is that the hospital was hit by debris from a Ukraine air defence missile, however the vaguer ‘provocation’ claims are also bandied about.  So too is the quite surreal charge that it is Kyiv that somehow manufactures Russia’s attacks and the resulting tragedies for the eve of Tuesday’s NATO summit. 

Russian state-controlled media largely fell silent after reporting the official defence ministry lies, however RIA Novosti did use a standard ploy and repeat all of the above assertions, attributing them to “a blogger from the USA”.  Any such ‘western blogger’ or journalist is invariably pro-Kremlin and typically repeats propaganda circulated either by state-controlled Russian media, or ‘Z’ or pro-war bloggers and others on social media.  Jackson Hinkle is certainly no exception, with all of the key lies repeated.  The point is not that there is no proof for his assertions.  There is, in fact, proof of the contrary, since there is video footage clearly identifying a KH-101 missile just before it hits the hospital.

Russia is using various means, from propaganda narrative to fake ‘trials’ of Ukrainian prisoners of war accused effectively of Russia’s war crimes in Mariupol, to try to shift the blame to the victim.  One such method identified in the Detector Media report is to claim that Ukraine is being irresponsible in positioning air defence systems in a city. If Russia is bombing civilian targets, the systems need to be positioned near those targets, not somewhere else.  Or more systems are needed enabling a mbrella shield over the entire country. Western countries refused to close air space over Ukraine and have been very slow at helping to enable Ukraine to defend itself, leaving no choice but to position air defence systems where it can usually at least prevent greater loss of life.

Some of the pro-Kremlin channels claim that there was another, supposedly legitimate, target a kilometre away.  That is an evidently flawed line and not only because Russia’s defence ministry boasted of hitting only the intended targets.  The missiles are claimed to have been ‘high-precision’ and should not have hit a children’s hospital a kilometre away, unless the hospital was the intended target.  Attempts to attribute the damage to flying debris will hardly wash when it is clear that the pro-Kremlin brigade know what was hit and are therefore very likely to have seen the footage showing the KH-101 bomb descending on the hospital.

Some of the propaganda is similar to that tried on after Russia bombed the maternity hospital in Mariupol on 9 March 2022   It is the so-called ‘Z’ or war bloggers who are effectively plugging a line that tries to justify Russia’s strike on Okhmatdyt with the claim being that the hospital was where Ukrainian leaders held secret meetings.  There are associated assertions with no basis in fact, such as the claim that there were more Ukrainian soldiers, than civilians involved in the rescue effort.  There are also efforts to suggest that there weren’t really any victims, and that only a façade was damaged.  One should not, of course, forget the standard claim that this was all a stunt and that the children shaking outside in their mother’s arms, the medical staff covered in blood, were all ‘actors’.

Detector Media also found some propagandists who were prepared to openly gloat, including Aleksandr Kots, military correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda.  Although impossible to comprehend, such gloating has been seen before, including on Russian state television talk shows.  While UNESCO and the international community condemned Russia’s barbaric airstrikes on the Transfiguration Cathedral and 25 other places of huge historical and cultural significance in Odesa in July 2023, chief Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov and his talk show guests were, effectively, all in favour.  Nor is Solovyov the exception, with Russia’s key propagandists having been vocal for many months in shouting on state television that Moscow should bomb or even ‘nuke’ Ukrainian cities. 

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