On April 8, 2022, a Tochka-U short-range ballistic missile struck the main railway station in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region of government-controlled Ukraine. The missile killed at least 50 people, including five children. Civilians had gathered at the station to flee the approaching Russian offensive, which has pivoted to the country’s east in recent weeks. A recent BBC report stated it had found “clear evidence” that the missile which struck the station had a cluster munitions warhead. Russian officials have blamed the strike on Ukraine, citing claims that the Russian military does not use the Tochka-U. Pro-Russian media cited other assertions relating to the missile’s serial number, and a hypothesised flight path of the missile. Bellingcat, and others in the open source community, have cross-referenced these claims with publicly available footage in an attempt to establish the origin of the Tochka-U missile that took dozens of lives at the Kramatorsk railway station on April 8. At the time of writing, the available open source evidence remains insufficient to reveal all details about the strike, including the direction of origin of the missile. However, it does appear to debunk a central argument by the Russian state in its defence: that its military does not operate the Tochka-U missile system.
Social media images and videos as well as Russian news reports from 2021 show the country’s forces displaying Tochka-U launchers, while satellite imagery from February 2022 seems to depict military vehicles consistent with the appearance and dimensions of the launchers at a base in south-western Russia. Experts Bellingcat spoke to also said that even though Russia has reportedly phased out the Tochka-U missile in recent years, that doesn’t render Russia’s stock of the weapons inoperable or mean they cannot still be deployed. Amnesty International, meanwhile, stated that a Tochka-U missile was used by Russia in Donetsk on 24 February 2022. (…) On the morning of April 8, at 10:13 am Kyiv time, the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed in a Telegram post that it had carried out “air-based” missile strikes against materiel for Ukrainian military reserves arriving at Pokrovsk, Slovyansk and Barvinkove railway stations. In the minutes that followed, local Telegram channels in non-government controlled areas of the Donetsk region were flooded with footage of missile launches. Less than 20 minutes later, reports emerged that Kramatorsk was under fire. By 10:44 am, Kamyshin announced on his Telegram channel that two missiles had struck the Kramatorsk railway station. (…) This is not the first time that Russia has denied operating the Tochka-U missile system. On March 16, two days after a missile struck the centre of Donetsk, Russia’s mission to the UN also denied that its military used the weapon. The Tochka-U missile plays a central role in the Russian authorities’ insistence that their armed forces could not possibly have been behind the missile strike on Kramatorsk. Namely, they insist that the Russian military has phased out use of this ballistic missile. These claims are seemingly in line with a recent modernisation drive for Russia’s military. In June 2020, state media website Interfax reported that the entire Russian military had updated its missile systems, replacing the Tochka-U with the more modern Iskander. (…) According to the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), a reporting partner of Bellingcat, a train loaded with Tochka-U launchers and loader vehicles (based on the BAZ 5921 and 5922 chasses, respectively) moved from Homyel in Belarus to the Russian city of Belgorod in late March. CIT cited a March 30 video which was posted to Twitter by the prominent user GirkinGirkin, showing the launchers being transported by train.
via bellingcat: Russia’s Kramatorsk ‘Facts’ Versus the Evidence