No one disputes that Russia has been conducting large aerial bombardments of ports and coastal cities including Odessa. No one disputes that structures, targets and personnel have been hit and damage has been done. The strikes are described by the partisan Kyiv Post as “unprecedented” “constant night attacks for several days”, causing “fear and destruction” and “terror from massive Russian missile attacks”.
The Post goes on to claim “the first attack, in the early hours of Tuesday, July 18, involved 21 drones and 7 missiles launched from ships in around the Crimean Peninsula. All were shot down over the port. The damage to the port was superficial, caused by heavy metal fragments that fell on some buildings in the port – in particular a restaurant on the cruise dock and its bulky Odesa Hotel, which had been in disuse for years.”
Quick considerations of Kyiv Post’s language & claims
Before we descend further into deconstructing this noise, we can consider the implications of just the Kyiv Post’s own claims. If these strikes are “unprecedented”, they dwarf in scale, size and/or targeting, any other strikes before, in some way. Russia is unlikely to be running out of weapons if it can afford to make increasingly unprecedented strikes at this point in the game. Nor would it be able make and sustain such unprecedented attacks for several days if it was low on ammo and it would not be able to land so many shots if Ukraine’s air defences were effective and replete with ammunition.
The claim that the first round of attacks caused superficial damage having been fully intercepted is contradicted by Russian MoD sources and partisan outlets, but also reports of “great damage” on the first night in Odessa, Nikolaev and Ochakov by the Ukrainian TG channel, Legitiminy:
18/07/2023
We were immediately right that there would be heavy arrivals on Odessa.
According to our data, the arrivals were on the port and identified air defence positions.
Also the strike hit the energy infrastructure of the Odessa region. There was a hit. There was a massive power surge during the night. Many people noticed it.
There were two hits on Nikolaev, plus on Ochakov.
Odessians who heard the rain of shrapnel - it was bullets from large-calibre machine guns and anti-aircraft guns falling from the sky. They cause great damage to the property of citizens and carry risks for people's lives. But it is forbidden to talk about it.
According to our information, they will not stop there, so be careful.
Since July 18th, Western reporting of the attacks has spun from a fully intercepted nothingburger to variously cruel and devastating in terms of direct damage and consequential military, political and economic damage. This raises two key issues:
Russia could have destroyed this week’s targets at any point in the past, with the same outcomes then as now. It waited until now when it’s “running out” of everything it needs to prosecute war. Why did it wait? Why agree to the grain deal from the start and give Ukraine advantages in war?
If these attacks are barbarically huge and indiscriminate, why are there so few attendant civilian casualties? If you wanted to kill civilians, why would you strike at 2-4AM when the greatest number of civilians are in the most predictable locations i.e. home?
“The strike… killed at least two people.”
“Ten people have been injured after Russia launched a “hellish” overnight attack on Ukraine's southern Odesa region.”
How can Russia launch a “very powerfully [sic], truly massive” strike on the second night that destroyed “60,000 tons of grain”, “an industrial facility… two warehouses, housing tobacco and fireworks”, and attack Kiev with Shahed drones and have only 10 civilian injuries in Odessa and none in Kiev? There’s a mis-triangulation between adjectives, claims of interception, and scale of damage. Two days ago, Kyiv Post then switched to speaking about the “devastating aftermath of Russia strikes on Odesa”.
How Zelensky destroys himself before the pro-narrative press piles on
What follows is a simple, easy test of logic and information that can and should be executed in the generation of propaganda, but is clearly not being done by any of the parties mentioned.
Kyiv Post claims “Russia Destroys Odesa’s Orthodox Cathedral, Church Official Condemns Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill” while showing images of people entering the largely intact structure, carrying out intact artefacts and stating “a high explosive missile hit the roof of the city’s most important religious building and destroyed the sanctuary inside, the part of the church in the area reserved for priests.” All of this directly contradicts its own headline. Further on there is an improperly attributed quote (the way it’s written the quote could be fabricated):
“The rocket of the Russian Federation ‘blessed’ by you flew directly into the altar of the church on the feast of saints, and I realized that there has been nothing in common with your understanding in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for a long time. Because of your personal ambitions, you have lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and other churches in the countries of ‘Holy Russia’! Because of death and murder!”
These words directly attribute the missile as being Russian and its use and impact as being an act of “death and murder.”
Supposed “destruction” of a cathedral 90m long and 47m wide. Note no collapse of any dome, tower or the columns supporting the overhang roof.
“At least one person was killed and dozens injured when Russian missiles hit the largest cathedral in Odesa, setting it on fire and badly damaging its roof and artworks.”
Nothing - no words, passages or pictures - support the claim that the cathedral was “destroyed”. It has been damaged. The scale of the damage has not even rendered the building unstable and unsafe because people were freely entering it, performing clean up and conducting services right beside it. Video and images from inside show that the vaulted roof is intact and that glass windows inside the dome supported by the damaged section of the roof are still intact.
This all matters when it comes to assessing the information being presented.
Last night, a Russian missile - it was an X-22, an anti-ship missile - hit the altar of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in Odesa...
This is an ultra-specific accusation from someone with access to all the means to know what kind of munition struck a target. Zelensky has no excuse for making a mistake, especially on this scale.
It can be launched in either high-altitude or low-altitude mode. In high-altitude mode, it climbs to an altitude of 27,000 m (89,000 ft) and makes a high-speed dive into the target, with a terminal speed of about Mach 4.6. In low-altitude mode, it climbs to 12,000 m (39,000 ft) and makes a shallow dive at about Mach 3.5.
Soviet tests revealed that when a shaped charge warhead weighing 1,000 kg (2,200 lb) was used in the missile, the resulting hole measured 5 m (16 ft) in diameter, 19.6 m2 (210 sq ft) in area, and was 12 m (40 ft) deep.
That’s the Wikipedia summary of the weapon that directly struck and “destroyed” the cathedral. It has a very large RDX warhead. Note, it is not described as a fragmentation blast warhead. Considering it is primarily an anti-ship munition, it needs to penetrate multiple steel hulls and detonate inside the target. The internals of the target generate fragmentation particles themselves. It is not a fragmentation blast that this missile depends upon to penetrate, damage and sink large, steel-hulled ships.
This missile struck the cathedral doing over Mach 1 and possibly above Mach 3. At average sea level conditions, Mach 1 is around 670 nautical miles per hour. The undetonated warhead weighs 1000kg/2200lbs so the missile weighs more than this, even if it has burned all its fuel. On kinetic energy alone, such an impact should create a crater in the floor of a building. A roof structure of tile and thin support beams (visible in the photo of the cathedral) will not prevent significant traces of blast damage from appearing on the ground.
Let’s see what the detonation of a standard, unpowered 2000lb bomb looks like.
50m wide primary explosion. 370m wide primary lethal blast zone with up to 800m radius of damage via shockwaves. That’s a primary explosion wider than the cathedral, more than half its length and a primary lethal blast zone 4x bigger than the cathedral’s longest dimension. That’s an unpowered bomb with no rocket propellant, travelled at a gravity accelerated speed, which is likely to reach a freefall terminal velocity below Mach 1 on impact. It creates a crater 50m wide and 11m deep, assuming it is unshaped. Some of that ground penetration will be due to the blast and some to kinetics.
Just a 2000lb, unpowered, unshaped charge-carrying bomb dropped on the cathedral would have literally obliterated the building. No window would have been intact inside the primary blast zone. All the cathedral’s walls would have been blown out and there would be nothing of the structure to support any roof. The tower would have been blown apart and over.
Here’s some purported footage of a KH-22 in action.
Here’s what the cathedral looked like after it had been hit with a KH-22:
Does any of the visible damage to the cathedral match, even slightly, your expectation of the damage a supersonic, shaped, non fragmentation 1000KG warhead does to its target?
Denials that the cathedral was struck by a Ukrainian air defence missile
Footage exists purporting to show the launch of air defence missiles proximate to the cathedral and the striking of it by an air defence missile that, for some reason, dived into it. It’s practically impossible to be sure the footage shows what it claims, given that it is shot from distance, at night.
Without looking at the footage, consider the following. Ukraine employs a variety of air defence missiles, including Hawk, AIM120, S300, BUK-1, and Patriot. All of these systems carry warheads commonly below 150KG. Hawk is 43KG, Aim120 22KG, S300 24-150KG depending upon target (anti-air, ground or ship), BUK circa 70KG, Patriot up to 143KG.
At their largest, these warheads are 9x smaller than a KH-22. At their smallest they are 45x smaller. These warheads are commonly burst fragmentation with a proximity and possibly contact fuse. The aim of an air defence munition is to damage the air target enough to cause it to detonate, break up or deviate. A proximate blast with a shockwave and fragmentation pattern stands the best chance of hitting the target sufficiently, like using buckshot to kill a bird.
Given the damage a 1000KG supersonic warhead can do, compared to the 9x+ smaller air defence missiles that were being fired, how can Zelensky’s explicit claim of a direct hit by a KH-22 on the cathedral with no crater or wall collapses be true?
It simply cannot be true.
Why then tell such an egregious lie in public for all to judge your integrity and immediately find it lacking?
Why would “news” outlets use the kind of language above, married to images, footage and verbal descriptions that instantly contradict the outlets’ claims?
Shouldn’t propaganda be remotely believable and written in such a way that it withstands scrutiny? Why would the President of a nation tell an egregious lie and commit that lie to writing on his official website?
Have we become so stupid that propaganda requires no effort whatsoever to produce? Are people so lazy that they cannot think?
Does the President of Ukraine publicly lie without thinking?
It's extremely difficult to find any world leader that doesn't constantly lie. Remember, most of these clowns are acting on the world stage, are monstrously arrogant and cannot afford to look the slightest bit inept. In reality, they fool only the blind since ALL of them are inept, incompetent and dangerous.
It's extremely difficult to find any world leader that doesn't constantly lie. Remember, most of these clowns are acting on the world stage, are monstrously arrogant and cannot afford to look the slightest bit inept. In reality, they fool only the blind since ALL of them are inept, incompetent and dangerous.