Russian propaganda is strenuously trying to expose the shelling of Kherson, which took place on December 24, as an attack by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. On the same day, the pro-Kremlin media began to massively quote the head of the occupation administration of the Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, who said :
“Today, militants of Ukrainian armed formations carried out a terrorist shelling of Kherson, as a result of which civilians were killed. This is a disgusting provocation with the obvious aim of blaming the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”
According to Saldo, the nature of the damage clearly shows that the strikes came from the north and northwest of the city.
But even to propagandists, the words of the collaborator did not seem the most convincing evidence. Therefore, Z-military correspondents began to distribute on the network an “analysis” of images from the scene of the tragedy.
“I found only one photo of the hit with reference to the terrain. The funnel in the photo has already been cleaned up, but the furrows from the fragments on the asphalt have not been removed. Using them, you can easily establish where the projectile came from, namely, from the north, from where our soldiers cannot be. There are only villains and villains. The life of the people who live in Kherson means nothing to them,” says military commander of Komsomolskaya Pravda Alexander Kots.
However, these conclusions are wrong. OSINT analyst Def Mon writes on Twitter that the projectile always hits the ground at an acute angle. Therefore, the flow of fragments in the direction of the projectile will fly farther than the fragments directed against the movement – they will enter the ground very close to the place of explosion. One side of the projectile always has an inclination towards the ground, and the larger it is, the more fragments and energy of the blast wave will go into the ground near the explosion site.
What Kotz calls "splinter grooves in the asphalt" are actually blast damage to the asphalt that forms on the south side of the crater. This proves that the projectile was fired from the south or southeast, and not from the north, most likely from the Russian side.
Bild journalist Julian Repke, who previously investigated shelling in Donbas in 2015, agrees with this. According to him, when a Grad MLRS projectile hits the ground, the main energy of the explosion, as well as the rest of the engine energy, go back, which indicates the direction of the rocket launch. He concludes that the projectile was probably fired from the left bank of the Dnieper, which is now controlled by the Russian army.
Finally, the propagandist Vladimir Solovyov joined the so-called analysis. On his Telegram channel, he published a video titled "Mass murder in Kherson – a provocation by the Nazis." Solovyov added his own “arguments” to the “analysis” of Kots: it seemed suspicious to him that the journalists of the French agency AFP could be at the scene of the tragedy even before the ambulance arrived (although in the video itself, filmed by the journalists, it is clear that an ambulance is already working on the spot, police and emergency services). He also draws attention to the fact that the Ukrainian authorities did not announce the alarm. According to Solovyov, this was done on purpose, "so that there were more victims."
However, the speed of the Grad MLRS projectile that was fired at Kherson is almost twice the speed of sound. Various Russian sources indicate that this speed is between 690 and 715 m/s (the speed of sound in air is 336 m/s). Therefore, the air raid simply would not have had time to work. The local authorities are talking about it too. As adviser to the mayor of Kherson Roman Golovnya recalled in an interview with the Groshi YouTube channel, the city is practically on the front line.
“The speed of the flight of this projectile or flight, I will say from my own experience, when the exit is very well heard, then the arrival occurs in five or six seconds,” Alexander Samoylenko, head of the Kherson Regional Council, explained to the Current Time TV channel.
Recall that Russian troops shelled the center of Kherson on December 24. According to the latest data, 10 people died , about 80 were injured.
