OSCE Drone Downed Near Avdeyevka Last Night – ‘DNR’ May Have Already Admitted To Shooting It

July 26, 2016
Photo: Masi Nayyem

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An Invasion By Any Other Name: The Kremlin’s Dirty War in Ukraine

 


OSCE Spot Report On Downed Drone

Kiev Reports Heavy Shelling Of Avdeyevka, Krasnogorovka And Talakovka

The report says that both 122 mm self-propelled artillery and 120 mm mortars were used in attacks on the village of Talakovka, just outside Mariupol. Mortars were also used to shell neighboring Vodyanoye.

To the west of Donetsk, the government-controlled settlements of Maryinka and Krasnogorovka were subjected to heavy fire from 120 mm mortars. According to the Ukrainian military, tanks also fired 125 mm shells on Krasnogorovka, striking a school building.

The report says that both 122 mm self-propelled artillery and 120 mm mortars were used in attacks on the village of Talakovka, just outside Mariupol. Mortars were also used to shell neighboring Vodyanoye.

To the west of Donetsk, the government-controlled settlements of Maryinka and Krasnogorovka were subjected to heavy fire from 120 mm mortars. According to the Ukrainian military, tanks also fired 125 mm shells on Krasnogorovka, striking a school building.

To the north of Donetsk, the ATO Press Center claims that Russian-backed forces used 122 mm self-propelled artillery and both 120 and 82 mm mortars to shell positions in Avdeyevka, where an OSCE drone was shot down last night.

According to the military, at around 17:10 yesterday, a group of eight Russian-backed fighters attempted to assault a Ukrainian observation post. 

Press officer Arkadiy Radkivskiy told the 112 television channel that two enemy fighters had been killed and four wounded in the attack, which was repelled by Ukrainian fire.

The self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) has confirmed the deaths of two of their fighters, claiming two were wounded.

In addition, the DNR reports that a civilian man, born in 1962, was wounded by Ukrainian artillery fire in the western Petrovsky district of Donetsk.

Meanwhile the Donetsk police have published daylight photos of a house destroyed by shelling in Avdeyevka. We relayed a photo from Ukrainian soldier Masi Nayyem’s Facebook page earlier today, showing the house in flames (see above). Now the extent of the damage is more apparent:

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Radkivskiy also reported the use of mortars against positions near Novoselovka Vtoraya, Troitskoye and Novgorodskoye, as well as BMP infantry fighting vehicles to fire on those in Peski.

Another military press officer, Serhiy Berets, told 112 that five attacks had taken place in the Lugansk region overnight.

Berets said that 82 mm mortars had been used, along with anti-aircraft artillery, grenade launchers and small arms, against Ukrainian positions near Novotoshkovskoye, with other attacks near Lopaskino, Novozvanovka and Zolotoye. 

— Pierre Vaux

Censor.Net Business Editor Attacked In Kiev Last Night

Sergii Golovnov, editor-in-chief of Censor.net’s business section, says that he was attacked by two men in Kiev yesterday evening.

Golovnov wrote on his Facebook page today:

“Yesterday, after work, I was walking down Konstantinovkskaya Street towards Kontraktovaya Square. Two guys attacked.

Everything had been thought out. One came from the front in a hood, covering his face with his hand, pretending to be drunk. The other, from behind. They drew up with me, crossing from both sides. They knocked me to the floor, beat me up for a minute and ran off…

It wasn’t a robbery, because my bag flew off in one direction and my phone in the other. They didn’t take anything.”

Golovnov said that he had notified the police but did not expect any results, “not because the police are bad,” but because the attackers planned their attack to leave no evidence.

Censor.net editor Yuriy Butusov said that Golovnov had only received light injuries, but said that in light of recent attacks on journalists, the incident could not be taken lightly.

In recent weeks Ukraine has seen the assassination, by means of a car bomb, of Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet, the stabbing of a Forbes journalist and the beating of a Hromadske Zaporozhye journalist.

Pierre Vaux

OSCE Drone Downed Near Avdeyevka Last Night – ‘DNR’ May Have Already Admitted To Shooting It

An OSCE drone, used by the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM) for recording ceasefire violations and deployments of weaponry beyond the Minsk withdrawal lines, was shot down last night near Avdeyevka, north of Donetsk.

The OSCE confirmed the loss to The Interpreter

“OSCE SMM can confirm that it lost contact with an SMM long-range UAV around midnight yesterday in Donetsk region. More information will follow in a sport report. Any impediment to our monitoring, including interference with our UAVs, is a direct violation of the OSCE SMM mandate and the Minsk agreements.”

This morning Masi Nayyem, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, posted photographs of the remains of the drone, which he said had been shot down by Russian-backed fighters in the Avdeyevka area. 

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Nayyem identified the UAV as belonging to the OSCE due to the use of Canadian-made Novatel GPS equipment.

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He wrote:

At night an OSCE UAV flew over. The separatists take a dislike to the truth about them and their mortars, which rail our positions in the Avdeyevka industrial park every day. So any UAV is a thorn in their side. They most likely shot it down with MANPADS.

Nayyem claimed that Russian-backed forces also fired several shells to make it harder to recover the wreckage, with two of them overshooting and exploding near an apartment block.

A later round of shelling, at around 2:00 am, set a house in Avdeyevka ablaze, although the owner of the home was unharmed and went sleep in another house: 

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Whether the SMM UAV was really shot down by Russian-backed or Ukrainian forces remains to be seen. 

 We will have a better idea of what happened if the drone managed to film any anti-aircraft weaponry before it was destroyed.

Certainly, in two other recent cases where OSCE drones were shot down, the SMM has released photographs taken at locations where contact was lost showing Russian surface-to-air missile launchers, which were likely fired on the UAVs. 

But if, as Nayyem suggested, MANPADS were used, then finding such a smoking gun may be harder as such shoulder-launched missiles can be fired from better-concealed positions.

However the Russian-backed separatists may have already explained how the drone was shot down.

Eduard Basurin, deputy commander of the armed forces of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), told reporters this afternoon that his fighters had, within the last 24 hours, shot down a UAV that he claimed belonged to the Ukrainian military, with ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft artillery.

The drone had crashed on territory controlled by the Ukrainian armed forces, he added.

This seems a plausible candidate for the OSCE drone.

— Pierre Vaux