First unrectified images of Saki Air Base in Crimea via @planet following yesterday's multiple explosions. There's clearly been a massive fire across the base following whatever happened there:
Comparison of August 9th and August 10th imagery show very large craters, many destroyed aircraft, and destroyed buildings. It looks like a direct hit on the building on the left, so whatever it was seems accurate.
Colour images via @OSINTua with black and white images from Planet of the same locations for comparison.
From what I can tell a lot of planes and ammo got blown up in one area causing a fire that spread throughout the base, although the only damage from that fire which is visible is lots of burnt grass.
I can make out three craters, at sites that appear to be used for storage, so it could be they were targeted and everything else was destroyed when whatever was stored there went up. I'll also note the craters are a similar size.
One way to interpret those craters is precise strikes from a long range munition, which suggests it's a pretty good time for Russian holiday-makers in Crimea to make use of the Kerch Strait Bridge while they still can.
There's a building that's south of the tarmac that's badly damaged, although it doesn't look like there's been an impact nearby, so it could be damage from the size of the explosion. Doesn't bode well for aircraft that appear to be in one piece on the satellite imagery.
It also looks like another building was destroyed in the attack, unclear what its purpose was.
Looking around the airbase on the August 10th imagery there appears to be at least 5 aircraft taxiing towards the runway, guess they decided it was time to clear out.
There also appears to be a private jet heading towards the runway as well.
I suspect this is the same aircraft, parked on the west side of the airbase on August 9th.
Just east of that aircraft it appears another pair of buildings were hit. Left - August 9th, Right - August 10th (via @planet)
I've looked over the whole airbase repeatedly, so I don't think I've missed anything. One thing that does stand out is there's no impacts visible that look like they could be misses, so either they used very accurate weapons or they got very lucky.
I can't think of a time Russia has lost this many air assets in one day in recent memory, and they have to be deeply concerned about Ukraine's ability to do similar strikes elsewhere, especially the Kerch Strait Bridge.
Just measured the craters best I could, they seem about 20-25m wide, which would mean a pretty big munition.
New images from Maxar shows a few more details, it looks like more structures near the destroyed aircraft were also damaged and destroyed. Unclear what their function was:
An arms depot in Bulgaria, owned by Emilian Gebrev who Bellingcat revealed was targeted by assasins from Unit 29155 and previously had another arms depot blown up by the Skripal suspects, has exploded. Another Russian sabotage attempt? 24chasa.bg/biznes/article…
Gebrev was poisoned in 2015 at a time when he was providing munitions to Ukraine, a plot we uncovered following our investigation into the Skripal poisoning bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
An explosion in Czechia in late 2014 at an Gebrev-linked arms depot with munitions believed to be destined to Ukraine was also linked to Unit 29155, supervised personally by its commander, Col. Gen. Andrey Averyanov. bellingcat.com/news/2021/04/2…
The amount of tankie cope over this thread is pretty incredible, and also shows they'll take anything the Russian intelligence services claim at face value with no questions whatsoever.
Hopefully Russia will react with more lies so we have more content for the documentary.
The FSB's fairytale around the operation tells us they really didn't have a clue of how it was being run and needed to make up a story to save face when they got their intelligence assets exposed.
In case you missed it earlier, our thread responding to the FSB's face saving efforts after they accidentally ended up exposing a bunch of their intelligence operatives in a failed sting operation.
One of the various ongoing documentary productions we're working on at the moment. All going to plan we should start releasing them next year and have a constant production pipeline of documentaries until we run out of cool stories to tell
And we're talking big budget features docs, not YouTube videos (although we will probably do short form content too)
If this comes to a shock to anyone then you should probably spare us your future opinions on Russia and its conflicts.
Until there's real consequences attached to Russia's violations of its diplomatic agreements they have no reason to stick to them. Today's attacks should mean more arms to Ukraine, not another round of talks.
If there's one thing we've learned from the current OPCW conference it's Russia is still extremely mad at Bellingcat.
First they have a sad little screening of some garbage Russian documentary on the Navalny poisoning to counter a screening of the "Navalny" documentary, wherein Bellingcat helps embarass the Russian intelligence services by exposing their poisoning attempt tass.ru/mezhdunarodnay…
And they've just been whining about Bellingcat at the OPCW meeting, claiming we're get instructed by the West to debunk their disinformation. All of this I find both hugely amusing and motivating.