On the last day of summer, August 31, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation published on its Telegram channel a list of schools and educational institutions collected in five regions of Ukraine: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The list of schools was provided with a link to the site and also attached as a separate PDF file.
In the text of the post, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation accused the Armed Forces of Ukraine of shelling, and added a manipulative message with the following content:
"We demand from the United Nations and the entire international community to take effective measures to prevent the shelling of schools by the Kyiv regime and to guarantee the removal of these objects and those adjacent to their territories from damage by fire means of the armed forces and other paramilitary formations of Ukraine".
The Molfar team looked at this list and immediately noticed a strange nuance. Along with the full address of the school (index, name of the territorial district, settlement, street and house number), there were the geographical coordinates of all schools.
We immediately had two questions.
- Why specify exact coordinates, when with such a detailed address you can find the object on any offline or online map?
- Why do Russian terrorists need the exact coordinates of civilian objects?
The second question is rhetorical. Of course, we immediately understood that wherever it was possible to lie, the Russians would lie. And we also assumed that they could publish on their channels the same coordinates that they used for shelling civilian objects in Ukraine. And this assumption turned out to be true.
👉 File with fact-checking of shelling of Ukrainian schools by Russian occupation forces 👈
- We have analyzed all the listed schools, a total of 1,422 of them, of which 137 have already been shelled by Russian troops.
- All the shellings are carried out according to a single scenario: first a fire attack is carried out with the help of rockets, bombs or artillery shells, immediately after that, on the same day, the Russian propaganda media publish a news story accusing the Armed Forces of Ukraine of shelling.
- Also, among the analyzed cases were facts of schools shelling, which are far from the front line in the depths of the territories temporarily occupied by Russia. It makes no sense to fire on civilian objects so far from the front line. And it is simply technically impossible to use mortar weapons for this purpose by the Armed Forces of Ukraine due to the considerable distance. Aiming fire at such schools is possible only from the territories controlled by the Russian occupation forces.
With this fact-checking, we want to prove once again that Russia is waging an aggressive war against sovereign Ukraine. The occupying troops of the aggressor disregard all the rules of warfare. Civilian objects are constantly hit by terrorists. This is the genocide of the Ukrainian people. The cynicism with which Russia appeals to international organizations knows no bounds. This is an open disregard for all the rules and norms of international communication.
We demand the complete exclusion of Russia from the United Nations and other international institutions that must maintain peace and order in the world.
Russia is a terrorist country.
