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 28, 2022, 7 tweets

We're seeing a lot of images of cluster munitions being used in Ukraine, so there's a few things I want to highlight to assist with reporting of the incidents. There's two types of rockets, fired by BM-27 and BM-30 multiple rocket launchers.

These things are big, this is a reconstruction of one from when they first started being used in Syria, and the diagram on the right gives you a sense of the position of the cluster munitions at the front of the rocket, and the rocket motor behind them.

Generally when these munitions deploy their submunitions in the air the rocket motor and cluster munition section separate, and land in the ground, just like in this video from Ukraine, showing the cluster section impacting the ground.

What's we're seeing across Ukraine are the remains of these rockets embedded in the ground, and often being misreported as unexploded rockets. This is evidence of a successful deployment of cluster munitions, not an unexploded weapon.

They can land several hundreds meters away from where the cluster munitions are released, and the direction of impact can also be established by which way the munition remnants are pointing, like in this example

As the original images in this thread shows, it's possible to identify the type of rocket by their width, the configuration of their tail fins, and the rows of holes inside the cluster munition section. If you know which details to look for, they are very distinct.

However, it should also be noted the tail fin section can become detached, which can lead to misidentification. This picture shows both the rocket motor and the detached tail fin section nearby.

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