Eliot Higgins Profile picture
Founder and creative director of @Bellingcat and director of Bellingcat Productions BV. Author of We Are Bellingcat. Tonal Whiplash Zone.

Feb 17, 2022, 22 tweets

Reported location of today's nursery shelling in government controlled Eastern Ukraine. If this is the correct building the impact location would be here.

Images of the other side of the building show two windows then an entryway, and this is backed up by satellite imagery of both sides of the building.

More images of the location

Here's the current positions of the frontlines in relation to the nursery

The expected spin begins:

If there's multiple impacts from this shelling there's a chance there could be a crater that can be used to measure the direction of attack. We've done this previously with satellite imagery but it can be done on the ground.

Some important context to the reports of various shelling this morning

More confirmation of the location, an image from the nursery's Facebook page that matches the interior of the shelled location. h/t @zzradchenko facebook.com/16669773733531…

Video footage from inside the nursery following the attack

Various collected images and videos giving a broader sense of the area, and showing one additional impact crater.
facebook.com/otupivnich/pos…

I believe this is the crater location, give or take a few meters. If there were more images of the crater it could be possible to establish the direction of attack, so let me know if you spot any.

Thanks to @Taras_Syniuk who pointed out this image of the crater. It gives a clear view of the spray pattern, which is consistent with the incoming fire coming from the south. This would be in the direction of Russian backed separatist frontlines.

Thanks to @Timmi_Allen for putting this together, which measures the direction of the projectile base on the create shape. The blue arrow points to the direction of the gun.

This points towards Russian backed separatist frontline positions. The red line is 5km long, so easily within range of artillery. Also note the hole in the building is on the south side of the building.

This map gives a sense of the frontline position, it follows the river to the south

The first image in this set showing another artillery attack in Ukraine is at 48.741997, 38.376503. If anyone has more images of the crater it could be possible to establish the direction of this attack too.

Some of the visual clues to indicate it's the correct location, for fans of coloured boxes (the most useful OSINT tool)

Ukrainian SBU sharing images from the attacks, including these images of munition debris. Looks like a partial fuze in the first image, and the third image is pretty chunky.

I think Johnson might come to regret this phrasing. Pro-Russian sources initially reported this as a Ukrainian attack on a nursery in separatist territory. When they realised it was in government territory they claimed it was a government false flag. theguardian.com/world/live/202…

More analysis of the crater shape and direction of attack by @Timmi_Allen for the 2nd attack reported today on a Ukrainian school. This is based on a technique we developed for measuring the direction of artillery attacks in this report: bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

This is in the same direction as @JulianRoepcke pointed to in his geolocation of the same images, towards the closest frontline positions south-east of the impact site.

The Luhansk People's Republic responds to allegations they shelled the nursery by claiming the shell could have only hit the southeast facing building from the east, controlled by the Ukrainian military, ignoring the crater nearby that points south. t.me/millnr/7122

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