The Vinnytsia Tragedy Part 1
Another Commentary Coming from
An American in Ukraine
by Dr. E. C. Olson, Mission Director
Russians Bombs Target Civilians in Vinnytsia and a Tragedy within a Tragedy: the murder of Elizaveta Dmytriyeva
Three days before I arrived in Ukraine, at 10:30 in the morning on July 14th, three Russian Kalibr cruise missiles slammed into the center of the city of Vinnytsia in what was yet another intentional focused attack on civilian targets, where the Russians purposefully avoided hitting any of the various military installations found in and around this city of 370,000, so that instead they could further terrorize everyday Ukrainian citizens.
In one of the larger casualty bombings of Ukrainian cities since the War began, 26 civilians were killed and 100 more were seriously injured here in Vinnytsia – – and as tragic as that alone was, it was the identity of one of the dead that made this a tragedy within a tragedy, one that deeply scarred the Ukrainian people and appalled people worldwide.
I had to see for myself the scene of one of the war’s ghastlier Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Five days before I stood here in front of the windowless shell of this commercial-residential building, several long-range Russian cruise missiles struck it and the plaza I was standing in the middle of.
But as tragic as the burned-out building was, even more heartbreaking was the small memorial erected here in honor of one of the victims.
When the gravity of what occurred here on July 14th hit me, it literally forced me to my knees, but there even a prayer seemed insufficient because I was so angry and mystified by what God had allowed to happen here (but I also knew that it was not God’s malfeasance that angered me so much, but instead it was my imperfect spirituality which led me futilely searching for accountability that I wouldn’t find).
Frustrated by my inability to find any spiritual redemption, I flipped my inner switch from compassionate aid provider to fact-finding investigative reporter and began dissecting the crime. But to be totally honest, I found it hard to just stick to the facts and ignore the human tragedy that took place here. Triggers were everywhere: beginning with the mound of toys left in loving memory of one of the victims of this brutal attack.
So just as when I was there standing amidst that horrific scene when my thoughts drifted from fact-gathering to that one victim in particular, so too does my reporting here drift back and forth between these two tragedies, so please bear with me.
This is difficult. Perhaps it’s the fact that I have a grand-daughter the same age as this one victim – that certainly plays into this. Regardless, objectively reporting this is very difficult.
I think that I have come to see the Vinnytsia tragedy as the symbol for all of these Russian attacks on civilian targets, an attack count now exceeding one-hundred, and I have come to see this one innocent victim as literally the poster child for all of the children intentionally murdered by Russian oppressors. And this in turn is unavoidably linked to the personal reasons why I came here in the first place to help the Ukrainian people.
For me, there could be no clearer contrast of Good versus Evil than this attack. Here too does this tragedy characterize the utter frustration I feel over why the West, or America or Europe en masse hasn’t already stopped this brutal genocide? What more evidence do they need?
And with saving children being one of the primary focuses of our Mission, here I found myself coming to Ukraine five days too late to possibly save this one child in particular.
Again frustration overwhelms me. So in-turn I have made that one of my own triggers: whenever I find myself trapped in the box canyon of frustration, I turn around and proceed back down the path of factual reporting, so here below I continue with that.
The crime committed here
To begin with, the vulgarity of the Russian actions here has compelled me to report this as a murder, a mass murder in fact, and not anything associated with a war or a military action.
I call it murder because that’s what it was.
Whether a noun or a verb, murder is defined as having three components: the actual act of killing one or more people, second is the requirement noting it as an “unlawful” act, and third, specifically labelling it as a “premeditated act”. The Russians did all three.
In that legal context, a Russian commander somewhere – more-than-likely taking his orders from the highest-possible positions of authority (I’ll leave it up to an International Criminal Court prosecutor to identify that person as Vladimir Putin) – they intentionally and with clear premeditation singled out this assemblage of people and directed five of the most powerful tools of death directly at them. The reverberations that followed included the customary political positioning.
For example, when one of these seemingly senseless acts of violence is perpetrated against the Ukrainian people, the response coming from the three primary stakeholders is predictable:
From the Ukrainians, most often being embodied in statements coming from one or more government officials, they will rightfully report this as a terrorist attack intended to kill and injure as many Ukrainian civilians as possible, and most of these reports include one or more mentions of Russian “genocide”.
From the Russians will come abject denials from across-the-boards, sometimes these statements are issued by Kremlin leaders, who will point out or even fabricate news about there being a military target among the ruins, but otherwise they just categorically dismiss any intention of targeting civilians in particular.
From the international media the reports will mostly summarize both nation’s positions, but then these varied news bureaus will for the most part focus on the objective, on the facts, where it becomes hard for these news outlets to NOT claim this as being an intentional attack on civilians and a few of them might go so far as including mention of this being a repeated series of violent incidences and therefore the word “genocide” finds its way to copy.
We like to think of ourselves and our reporting as being objective and realistic, but as I have mentioned here in this article, our – my – sympathies are clearly aligned with the victims, with the innocents, which in my entire reporting thus far, are the Ukrainians, especially the Ukrainian civilians.
But as a scientist by training and career experience, I find it impossible to drift away entirely from the facts, so the editorial positions I often take are ones centered on irrefutable facts, but if those facts clearly portray acts of institutional violence being committed against innocent civilians, I will call it out as such.
Or if these violent acts would otherwise meet the definition of a crime, or even a War Crime or Crime Against Humanity, I will call it that as well. And if these repeated acts of institutional violence fit into a repeated pattern of intentional, premeditated violent acts committed against one particular group or class of people, then I will not hesitate to call it genocide.
So taking that together, in this reporting I am calling the July 14 Russian missile attacks on the city of Vinnytsya the mass murder of innocent Ukrainians because that’s what the evidence reveals and that is what fits the pattern of these such acts by the Russians.
I will also factual report however, that among the 25 dead were three Ukrainian military officers; Russia is of course making this the focal point of their commentary, claiming that the attack was 100% a military action intended on taking out these military officers. In pushing that story line the Russian are also avoiding referring to the 22 dead Ukrainians at all, who all were civilians, so it’s assumed that if pressed, Russia will claim that the death of these innocent people is merely “collateral damage”.
What has yet to be determined – which is something that I will continue to follow – is if these three Ukrainian officers were at the crime scene intentionally, as in holding an established meeting in military offices where the war was being discussed? Or were these just three fellow soldiers who just happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time?
But even if they were meeting in official capacities, that does nothing to lessen the accountability the Russians inherently have for killing upwards of 22 innocent civilians in the process.
To me the entire scale of the missile attack – firing five long-range ballistic missiles loaded with a collective 2,500 tons of explosive warheads – to take our three mid-level Ukrainian military officers – seems very unsymmetrical. Too unsymmetrical.
The weapons used to murder 22-plus innocent people
One of the overall personal observations or conclusions I have reached regarding the fighting prowess of the Russian forces – which too is reflected in the innate characteristics of the powerful political figure(s) back in Moscow pulling the strings – is that cowardice appears front and center. Individual cowardice and institutional cowardice.
Aside from the abject failure that was the initial late-February invasion by the Russians, very few if any of the military actions conducted by the Russians since then involved any face-to-face, bayonet-to-bayonet conventional combat.
In contrast, nearly all of the Russian military attacks have been “long-distance”, that is, instead of confronting the enemy head-on, be they civilian or military, the Russians have pressed buttons and pulled strings on their weapons of mass death from hundreds of miles away, if not thousands of miles away. Some military analysts may claim that this is smart – it’s Russia’s way of killing many without sacrificing any of their own – but I call it cowardice.
After all, how hard is it to kills dozens of people, when all you have to do is press a button? As opposed of having to put human beings in your crosshairs and watching as the round tears through their body? Or more up-close-and-personal, as opposed to driving a bayonet into your enemy at close range?
The Murder Weapon: Three Kalibr (SS-N-30A) LACM (Land attack cruise missiles)
Submarine variant: 3M-14K
Length: 20’
Payload: 1,000-pound warhead
Range: up to 2,000 miles
Propulsion: Turbojet, multi-stage solid-fuel
First use in combat: 2015, Syria
Speed: 0.8-3.0 Mach
Accuracy: 150’
In the Vinnytsya tragedy, that’s all it took. To be precise, all it took was someone in a Russian submarine or frigate, far off in the Black Sea, pressing enough buttons to send five Kalibr cruise missiles in the direction of the Vinnytsya city center. Not present was the ability to look any of your victims in the eyes during their last seconds alive, absent were their cries of pain, gone was the blood and brain splatter that routinely gathers on the uniform of soldiers fighting in close combat.
All it took was pressing a button.
Launched from several hundred miles away, it only took a couple minutes for the five missiles to streak through the Ukrainian airspace. Two of those Kalibr cruise missiles fell prey to Ukraine’s aerial defense system but three would find their mark.
The target: the scene of the mass murder
Deep in the bowels of the launch vehicle in the Black Sea, the coordinates of the intended target were set at 49.233083 degrees latitude, and 28.468217 degrees longitude – which was the heart of this bustling, previously “safe” city.
The accomplices to this murder back in Moscow knew that the heart of a city at ten-o’clock in the morning would offer the opportunity for a large number of intended targets. Businesspeople hustling to their next meeting, merchants putting out their wares…and mothers pushing strollers on this warm sunny summer day.
The Russian targeting was spot-on as the three Kalibr missiles that evaded the Ukrainian aerial defense system streaked lower as they approached the bustling center of the city. Perhaps some of the victims heard the incoming screech of the now sub-sonic missile.
Others in their last seconds alive probably saw a blistering-bright heat-flash of detonation. Some of them assuredly felt their bodies being either ripped in half (those were the lucky ones for their death came quickly), or those more unfortunate felt their body being shredded by the red-hot metal fragments that the explosion sent flying in all directions.
All three missiles detonated within a radius of no more than 500 feet, effectively destroying two large buildings, one was a Soviet-era concert hall, the other a large, mixed-use building that included a medical center, offices, store fronts and numerous residential apartments.
One fact that I have not been able to validate is if there were any legitimate military targets of any kind located here in the Vinnytsia city center. The Russians claim that at the time of the attack, several high-ranking Ukrainian Air Force officers were meeting in the concert hall. It is true, three Ukrainian Air Force officers were listed among the dead. But even that, even if three military officers were being targeted, that would mean that the other 22-plus dead and more than 100 injured were “collateral damage”, and that itself is unacceptable.
The scene of total devastation 24 hours after the attack
The Murder Victims
On the very day we visited Vinnytsia – July 20th – government officials reported that 20-year-old Olha Lysenko had just died in the hospital, bringing the death toll of this Russian attack to 26. Olha was returning to her apartment in Vinnytsia’s Peremohy Square from an appointment at her dentist when the three missiles impacted, leaving her with fatal burns over 98% of her body. One can only imagine how brutally painful those last six days of Olha’s life were.
CONTINUED IN PART II