Кто убивал мирняк в Буче?
Что мы имеем?
1. Десятки жертв Бучи погибли от попадания стреловидных поражающих элементов (под катом полный текст статьи в британской Гардиан, потому что рукописи не должны гореть):
Dozens of Bucha civilians were killed by metal darts from Russian artillery
Forensic doctors discover fléchettes - rarely used in modern warfare - in bodies found in mass graves
Dozens of civilians who died during the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian city of Bucha were killed by tiny metal arrows from shells of a type fired by Russian artillery, forensic doctors have said.
Pathologists and coroners who are carrying out postmortems on bodies found in mass graves in the region north of Kyiv, where occupying Russian forces have been accused of atrocities, said they had found small metal darts, called fléchettes, embedded in people’s heads and chests.
“We found several really thin, nail-like objects in the bodies of men and women and so did others of my colleagues in the region,” Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian forensic doctor, told the Guardian. “It is very hard to find those in the body, they are too thin. The majority of these bodies come from the Bucha-Irpin region.”
Independent weapons experts who reviewed pictures of the metal arrows found in the bodies, seen by the Guardian, confirmed that they were fléchettes, an anti-personnel weapon widely used during the first world war.
These small metal darts are contained in tank or field gun shells. Each shell can contain up to 8,000 fléchettes. Once fired, shells burst when a timed fuse detonates and explodes above the ground.
Fléchettes, typically between 3cm and 4cm in length, release from the shell and disperse in a conical arch about 300m wide and 100m long. On impact with a victim’s body, the dart can lose rigidity, bending into a hook, while the arrow’s rear, made of four fins, often breaks away causing a second wound.
According to a number of witnesses in Bucha, fléchette rounds were fired by Russian artillery a few days before forces withdrew from the area at the end of March.
Svitlana Chmut, a resident of Bucha, told the Washington Post she had found several nailed on her car.
Although human rights groups have long sought a ban on fléchette shells, the munitions are not prohibited under international law. However, the use of imprecise lethal weapons in densely populated civilian areas is a violation of humanitarian law.
According to Neil Gibson, a weapons expert at the UK-based Fenix Insight group, who has reviewed the photos of the fléchettes found in Bucha, the metal darts came from a 122mm 3Sh1 artillery round, in use by Russian artillery.
“Another uncommon and rarely seen projectile,” said Gibson on Twitter. “This time it’s the Russian equivalent of the US ‘Beehive’ series of Anti-personnel (APERS) projectiles … It operates like a true shrapnel projectile, but is filled with fléchettes and a wax binder.”
Fléchettes have been used as ballistic weapons since the first world war. Dropped by the then-novel airplanes to attack infantry, the lethal metal darts were able to pierce helmets. They were not widely used during the second world war, but re-emerged in the Vietnam war, when the US employed a version of fléchette loads, packed into plastic cups.
“Fléchettes are an anti-personnel weapon designed to penetrate dense vegetation and to strike a large number of enemy soldiers,” according to Amnesty International. “They should never be used in built-up civilian areas.”
“You don’t have to be an arms expert to understand that Russia ignored the rules of war in Bucha,” Bucha’s mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said. “Bucha was turned into a Chechen safari, where they used landmines against civilians.”
Russian forces captured Bucha, 18.5 miles (30km) north-west of Kyiv, after ferocious fighting a few days after the invasion began in February. They were given an order to retreat at the end of March and in the subsequent days, mass gravescontaining the bodies of hundreds of people who had apparently been massacred came to light.
A team of 18 experts from the forensic department of France’s national gendarmerie, alongside a team of forensic investigators from Kyiv, have started documenting the terror inflicted on civilians during the month-long occupation.
“We are seeing a lot mutilated (disfigured) bodies,” said Pirovsky. “A lot of them had their hands tied behind their backs and shots in the back of their heads. There were also cases with automatic gunfire, like six to eight holes on the back of victims. And we have several cases of cluster bombs’ elements embedded in the bodies of the victims.”
Evidence collected by the Guardian during a visit to Bucha, Hostomel and Borodianka, and reviewed by independent weapons experts, showed that Russian troops used cluster munitions - which are banned in much of the world - and powerful unguided bombs in populated areas, which have destroyed at least eight civilian buildings.
Fléchettes are rarely used in modern warfare, other than periodically by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), which deployed them in military operations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, killing and wounding civilians.
In March 2008, a Palestinian journalist and videographer with Reuters, Fadel Shana, was killed by fléchettes from a shell fired by an Israeli tank. X-rays later showed metal darts embedded in Shana’s chest, legs and flak jacket, which was not armoured.
2. Российские позиции в Буче подвергались систематическому артобстрелу, разрушившему значительную часть города. При обстрелах использовались боеприпасы со стреловидными поражающими элементами (под катом полный текст статьи в Вашингтон Пост, потому что рукописи не должны гореть):
Lethal darts were fired into a Ukrainian neighborhood by the thousands
By Alex Horton
April 18, 2022 at 3:05 a.m. EDT
BUCHA, Ukraine - At Svitlana Chmut’s house outside Kyiv, there are carrots in her garden and deadly Russian mini-arrows in her yard.
A pile of the sharp, finned projectiles rounded up by Chmut are now gathering rust in the spring’s fine mist. She combed her walled courtyard for them, she said, after a Russian artillery shell carrying them burst somewhere overhead days before the Russians withdrew late last month, seeding the area with thousands of potentially lethal darts. Some were embedded in the tarp that covered her vehicle, as if someone nailed them to her car.
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“If you look closely on the ground around my house, you will find a lot more of them,” said Chmut, 54.
These projectiles, called fléchettes, are rarely seen or used in modern conflict, experts have said. Many landed in the street in the strike, Chmut said, including some observed by Washington Post reporters, among fields of gear and the occasional liquor bottle or chocolate bar abandoned by retreating Russian soldiers.
At three centimeters in length, these fléchettes look like tiny arrows. They have a long history in war - a version of them was dropped from airplanes in World War I and used by the United States in Vietnam - but are not in common use today. Shells packed with fléchettes are primed to explode over infantry formations and spew projectiles in a conical pattern, with some versions dispersing fléchettes across an area three football fields wide.
Chmut found the projectiles in her car the morning of March 25 or 26, she said, after a night of intense shelling on both sides. It’s not clear if Russian troops were wounded by their own shell. The soldiers set up artillery positions and parked tanks in yards near Chmut’s home but would move into civilian houses at night, she said. Fléchettes would not pose a danger to people inside buildings.
Fléchettes are narrowly shaped to achieve aerodynamic stability and with simple, nail-like manufacturing in mind, said Neil Gibson, a munitions expert at the U.K.-based Fenix Insights group. The fléchettes recovered from Chmut’s yard probably came from a 122 mm 3Sh1 artillery round, he said, which is among a few Russian munitions that carry the projectiles.
Gibson has reviewed photos of those artillery rounds left behind by Russian troops but has not seen their documented use in Ukraine, he said. Maj. Volodymyr Fito, a spokesperson for Ukrainian land forces command, said the Ukrainian military does not use shells with fléchettes.
Some human rights groups have decried the use of fléchettes because they are indiscriminate weapons that can strike civilians even if they are aimed at military formations. They are not banned by international conventions, but “they should never be used in built-up civilian areas,” Amnesty International has said.
Fléchettes drew wide concern in the 1970s among international organizations but have mostly avoided bans because they were not used en masse in conflicts after the Vietnam War, when the focus turned to cluster and incendiary munitions, international relations professor Eitan Barak wrote in his book “Deadly Metal Rain.”
The exception, Barak notes, is the Israeli use of fléchettes in the Gaza Strip. Israel began phasing out tank rounds with the projectiles in 2010, two years after soldiers fired a fléchette-packed salvo at a Reuters cameraman when they mistook his camera for a weapon, killing him along with eight civilians.
It is already illegal to target civilians, and the irregular fragmentation of a typical artillery shell probably causes more damage to a body than fléchettes, which produce wounds closer to gunshots, Gibson said. They are also generally less useful, he said, because they are mostly appropriate for specific circumstances, like striking troops in the open gathered across a large area.
Bucha, which has seen some of the gravest atrocities committed by Russian forces, was devastated by shelling throughout Russia’s failed bid to take the capital, including in Chmut’s neighborhood, when acrid smoke and gunpowder overpowered the senses.
“Everything around us was burning,” she said. “There was no fresh air, and you could not see the sun.”
Enemy troops swarmed Chmut’s neighborhood, raiding the homes for food, electronics and liquor, she said, and a sniper perched on a construction crane killed several civilians trying to flee out of town.
Her husband Valerii flipped through videos shared by their neighbors of dead bodies strewn in a nearby road. Russian forces also took on a gradually obsessive mission to shoot down a Ukrainian flag planted on another crane but failed to do so for weeks, Chmut said.
Through it all, Chmut stayed focused on her gardening after her shop was looted, turning to her potatoes, beets and radishes.
She is less interested in the fléchettes. The Russian soldiers left a forest’s worth of wood in the form of ammunition crates, and they will come in handy to feed a fire during the next harsh winter. And the metal from discarded artillery shells she collected, Chmut said, will soon make a lovely fence.
1 + 2 = ? Как вы думаете, кто методически расстреливал тяжелой артиллерией российские позиции в Буче, попутно убивая десятки мирных жителей?
1. Десятки жертв Бучи погибли от попадания стреловидных поражающих элементов (под катом полный текст статьи в британской Гардиан, потому что рукописи не должны гореть):
Dozens of Bucha civilians were killed by metal darts from Russian artillery
Forensic doctors discover fléchettes - rarely used in modern warfare - in bodies found in mass graves
Dozens of civilians who died during the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian city of Bucha were killed by tiny metal arrows from shells of a type fired by Russian artillery, forensic doctors have said.
Pathologists and coroners who are carrying out postmortems on bodies found in mass graves in the region north of Kyiv, where occupying Russian forces have been accused of atrocities, said they had found small metal darts, called fléchettes, embedded in people’s heads and chests.
“We found several really thin, nail-like objects in the bodies of men and women and so did others of my colleagues in the region,” Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian forensic doctor, told the Guardian. “It is very hard to find those in the body, they are too thin. The majority of these bodies come from the Bucha-Irpin region.”
Independent weapons experts who reviewed pictures of the metal arrows found in the bodies, seen by the Guardian, confirmed that they were fléchettes, an anti-personnel weapon widely used during the first world war.
These small metal darts are contained in tank or field gun shells. Each shell can contain up to 8,000 fléchettes. Once fired, shells burst when a timed fuse detonates and explodes above the ground.
Fléchettes, typically between 3cm and 4cm in length, release from the shell and disperse in a conical arch about 300m wide and 100m long. On impact with a victim’s body, the dart can lose rigidity, bending into a hook, while the arrow’s rear, made of four fins, often breaks away causing a second wound.
According to a number of witnesses in Bucha, fléchette rounds were fired by Russian artillery a few days before forces withdrew from the area at the end of March.
Svitlana Chmut, a resident of Bucha, told the Washington Post she had found several nailed on her car.
Although human rights groups have long sought a ban on fléchette shells, the munitions are not prohibited under international law. However, the use of imprecise lethal weapons in densely populated civilian areas is a violation of humanitarian law.
According to Neil Gibson, a weapons expert at the UK-based Fenix Insight group, who has reviewed the photos of the fléchettes found in Bucha, the metal darts came from a 122mm 3Sh1 artillery round, in use by Russian artillery.
“Another uncommon and rarely seen projectile,” said Gibson on Twitter. “This time it’s the Russian equivalent of the US ‘Beehive’ series of Anti-personnel (APERS) projectiles … It operates like a true shrapnel projectile, but is filled with fléchettes and a wax binder.”
Fléchettes have been used as ballistic weapons since the first world war. Dropped by the then-novel airplanes to attack infantry, the lethal metal darts were able to pierce helmets. They were not widely used during the second world war, but re-emerged in the Vietnam war, when the US employed a version of fléchette loads, packed into plastic cups.
“Fléchettes are an anti-personnel weapon designed to penetrate dense vegetation and to strike a large number of enemy soldiers,” according to Amnesty International. “They should never be used in built-up civilian areas.”
“You don’t have to be an arms expert to understand that Russia ignored the rules of war in Bucha,” Bucha’s mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said. “Bucha was turned into a Chechen safari, where they used landmines against civilians.”
Russian forces captured Bucha, 18.5 miles (30km) north-west of Kyiv, after ferocious fighting a few days after the invasion began in February. They were given an order to retreat at the end of March and in the subsequent days, mass gravescontaining the bodies of hundreds of people who had apparently been massacred came to light.
A team of 18 experts from the forensic department of France’s national gendarmerie, alongside a team of forensic investigators from Kyiv, have started documenting the terror inflicted on civilians during the month-long occupation.
“We are seeing a lot mutilated (disfigured) bodies,” said Pirovsky. “A lot of them had their hands tied behind their backs and shots in the back of their heads. There were also cases with automatic gunfire, like six to eight holes on the back of victims. And we have several cases of cluster bombs’ elements embedded in the bodies of the victims.”
Evidence collected by the Guardian during a visit to Bucha, Hostomel and Borodianka, and reviewed by independent weapons experts, showed that Russian troops used cluster munitions - which are banned in much of the world - and powerful unguided bombs in populated areas, which have destroyed at least eight civilian buildings.
Fléchettes are rarely used in modern warfare, other than periodically by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), which deployed them in military operations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, killing and wounding civilians.
In March 2008, a Palestinian journalist and videographer with Reuters, Fadel Shana, was killed by fléchettes from a shell fired by an Israeli tank. X-rays later showed metal darts embedded in Shana’s chest, legs and flak jacket, which was not armoured.
2. Российские позиции в Буче подвергались систематическому артобстрелу, разрушившему значительную часть города. При обстрелах использовались боеприпасы со стреловидными поражающими элементами (под катом полный текст статьи в Вашингтон Пост, потому что рукописи не должны гореть):
Lethal darts were fired into a Ukrainian neighborhood by the thousands
By Alex Horton
April 18, 2022 at 3:05 a.m. EDT
BUCHA, Ukraine - At Svitlana Chmut’s house outside Kyiv, there are carrots in her garden and deadly Russian mini-arrows in her yard.
A pile of the sharp, finned projectiles rounded up by Chmut are now gathering rust in the spring’s fine mist. She combed her walled courtyard for them, she said, after a Russian artillery shell carrying them burst somewhere overhead days before the Russians withdrew late last month, seeding the area with thousands of potentially lethal darts. Some were embedded in the tarp that covered her vehicle, as if someone nailed them to her car.
Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia's war in Ukraine.
“If you look closely on the ground around my house, you will find a lot more of them,” said Chmut, 54.
These projectiles, called fléchettes, are rarely seen or used in modern conflict, experts have said. Many landed in the street in the strike, Chmut said, including some observed by Washington Post reporters, among fields of gear and the occasional liquor bottle or chocolate bar abandoned by retreating Russian soldiers.
At three centimeters in length, these fléchettes look like tiny arrows. They have a long history in war - a version of them was dropped from airplanes in World War I and used by the United States in Vietnam - but are not in common use today. Shells packed with fléchettes are primed to explode over infantry formations and spew projectiles in a conical pattern, with some versions dispersing fléchettes across an area three football fields wide.
Chmut found the projectiles in her car the morning of March 25 or 26, she said, after a night of intense shelling on both sides. It’s not clear if Russian troops were wounded by their own shell. The soldiers set up artillery positions and parked tanks in yards near Chmut’s home but would move into civilian houses at night, she said. Fléchettes would not pose a danger to people inside buildings.
Fléchettes are narrowly shaped to achieve aerodynamic stability and with simple, nail-like manufacturing in mind, said Neil Gibson, a munitions expert at the U.K.-based Fenix Insights group. The fléchettes recovered from Chmut’s yard probably came from a 122 mm 3Sh1 artillery round, he said, which is among a few Russian munitions that carry the projectiles.
Gibson has reviewed photos of those artillery rounds left behind by Russian troops but has not seen their documented use in Ukraine, he said. Maj. Volodymyr Fito, a spokesperson for Ukrainian land forces command, said the Ukrainian military does not use shells with fléchettes.
Some human rights groups have decried the use of fléchettes because they are indiscriminate weapons that can strike civilians even if they are aimed at military formations. They are not banned by international conventions, but “they should never be used in built-up civilian areas,” Amnesty International has said.
Fléchettes drew wide concern in the 1970s among international organizations but have mostly avoided bans because they were not used en masse in conflicts after the Vietnam War, when the focus turned to cluster and incendiary munitions, international relations professor Eitan Barak wrote in his book “Deadly Metal Rain.”
The exception, Barak notes, is the Israeli use of fléchettes in the Gaza Strip. Israel began phasing out tank rounds with the projectiles in 2010, two years after soldiers fired a fléchette-packed salvo at a Reuters cameraman when they mistook his camera for a weapon, killing him along with eight civilians.
It is already illegal to target civilians, and the irregular fragmentation of a typical artillery shell probably causes more damage to a body than fléchettes, which produce wounds closer to gunshots, Gibson said. They are also generally less useful, he said, because they are mostly appropriate for specific circumstances, like striking troops in the open gathered across a large area.
Bucha, which has seen some of the gravest atrocities committed by Russian forces, was devastated by shelling throughout Russia’s failed bid to take the capital, including in Chmut’s neighborhood, when acrid smoke and gunpowder overpowered the senses.
“Everything around us was burning,” she said. “There was no fresh air, and you could not see the sun.”
Enemy troops swarmed Chmut’s neighborhood, raiding the homes for food, electronics and liquor, she said, and a sniper perched on a construction crane killed several civilians trying to flee out of town.
Her husband Valerii flipped through videos shared by their neighbors of dead bodies strewn in a nearby road. Russian forces also took on a gradually obsessive mission to shoot down a Ukrainian flag planted on another crane but failed to do so for weeks, Chmut said.
Through it all, Chmut stayed focused on her gardening after her shop was looted, turning to her potatoes, beets and radishes.
She is less interested in the fléchettes. The Russian soldiers left a forest’s worth of wood in the form of ammunition crates, and they will come in handy to feed a fire during the next harsh winter. And the metal from discarded artillery shells she collected, Chmut said, will soon make a lovely fence.
1 + 2 = ? Как вы думаете, кто методически расстреливал тяжелой артиллерией российские позиции в Буче, попутно убивая десятки мирных жителей?