Quote from: johhnyUA on Today at 12:31:17 PM

Ofc, russian scum "found" some "clues" that this ukrainians who shoot prison camp. This is so logical: we are shooting warehouses and command bunkers, but now for some reasons we shoot prison camp where our captive soldiers. Yep, sounds legit *sarcasm*

As I said above, this is clear message: "Our you stop using HIMARS, or we execute all captive ukrainian soldiers"

The statements of the Russian side are more reasoned and supported by material evidence at least.

Here some arguments against the Russian attack on the Elenovka detention center:

1. The Russian side has the wreckage of the HIMARS rocket and its number. By the number of the rocket, investigators can determine the exact place from which this rocket was launched and who gave the order to launch it. The Ukrainian side has Arestovich's statement that the Russians set fire to their own detention center.

2. According to a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Ukrainian side has fired before at the same detention center in Yelenovka on the morning of May 17 from multiple launch rocket systems. Also, a Russian correspondent at the end of June reported that the village of Yelenovka was being regularly shelled by Ukrainian troops. Let me remind you that in May of this year, three deputies of the Verkhovna Rada from the political party Servant of the People (Vladimir Zelensky's party) proposed to shoot Ukrainian soldiers for desertion without trial - this is about the attitude of the Ukrainian government towards its soldiers.

3. If this is a staging, then it is too unpredictable. With such a large-scale staging with so many victims and participants, it is almost impossible to be able to hide it in secret, because there are so many extra eyes. There will always be hunters to chat. Moreover, there were eight victims among the guards, and it would not be difficult for them or their relatives to find out where the blow was actually fired from - which would risk greatly worsening relations between the Russian Federation and the residents of the DPR in case of staging. And this is the last thing the Russian authorities need now on the eve of the forthcoming referendums. The Security Service of Ukraine published an alleged telephone conversation between two Russian soldiers who are freely talking about a provocation in Yelenovka. This is despite the fact that Russian soldiers are forbidden to have mobile phones with them. But it seems that Ukrainians are still falling for these fakes.

4. A very dubious provocation. Prisoners from Azovstal are too valuable for an exchange fund and they giving valuable testimony to be spent on staged provocation. The doubtfulness of the provocation also lies in the fact that even before the official statements of the Ukrainian side, Russia had already foreshadowed that the blame for this attack would be laid by the Ukrainians on the Russian army. That is, it would take a lot of effort for an incomprehensible reaction. The statement of the Ukrainian side does not stand up to criticism, because the captured Azov people are checking by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the wives of the Ukrainian prisoners of war which come to Russian prisons to visit their husbands.

5. The strike on the isolation ward was dealt literally a day after the confession of the acting commander of the press service of the Azov regiment, famous Dmitry Kazatsky, appeared on the Internet that Aleksey Arestovich personally from the office of the President of Ukraine ordered to shoot a video of Russian prisoners of war being tortured.

July 28 - confession of Azov fighter from Yelenovka about Arestovich
July 29 - explosion in the detention center in Yelenovka

For those who are interested, there is the text of Dmitry Kazatsky's speech. Translated from Russian into English.

Reporter: Please introduce yourself and tell us what functions you performed in the Azov battalion?
Dmitry Kazatsky: Dmitry Kazatsky, acting commander of the press service of the Azov Regiment.
Reporter: What is your call sign?
Dmitry Kazatsky: Orest.
Reporter: Dmitry, tell us, were there any peculiarities in your information work before the outbreak of hostilities, and then later?
Dmitry Kazatsky: Until the 24th, we had our own recruiting information campaign. There were suggestions that the war would start and we were engaged in recruiting personnel, that is, we gathered people, just in case. But the most interesting thing is that even before the 24th, before the start of the war, from the office of the president, as I understand it, I heard the name Arestovich, what exactly Arestovich is doing this - creating an information campaign to collect shock content, video materials, on the brutal murders of Russian prisoners of war. For us then it was still strange, we did not think that it would begin. We just took the instructions and that's it. But then, when the war started, we started monitoring the information space in Ukraine and started noticing that these videos really started to appear. As I understand it, these instructions were issued not only to us, but also to other military units or organizations. That is, we saw videos from Kharkov and Kyiv. As I understand it, these instructions were sent to both Botsman and Chile in Kharkov, because we saw these videos in different telegram channels and different sources. I understood from these instructions that this information campaign was created in order to provoke some kind of anti-war movements in Russia, so that there would be some kind of actions. But in fact, when we later monitored the information space, this information campaign caused more negative in the world community, because it was a war crime, and it did not cause the proper result in Russia, because there were no actions there. When there was a war - I don't remember what date it was - new orders were issued to stop this campaign. I understood this was from Arestovich. I heard that it descended from him - to stop so as not to cause a negative image in the world community. I don't know who specifically did this from us, these videos were collected, but I know for sure that after leaving Azovstal, all video materials, all flash drives, all hard drives, computers were destroyed so that these videos would not remain.