At rush hour, in the busiest place, the bodies of the dead half burned on the ground around the missile crater with the shopping scattered, cars crumpled by the explosion, trees cut by shrapnel and a fire consuming what remains of the stores. Vladimir Putin, the leader who promised to save the Russophones of Ukraine in February 2022 is the one who is killing them. While Russia loses day by day and meter by meter the territory it still controls in Ukraine, it continues to cause massacres of Ukrainian civilians in Russian-speaking cities such as Odessa, Mikolaiv, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Dnipro…
This Wednesday, in the city of Kostiantinivka, Donetsk region, a missile blew up the central market, killing 17 people so far and injuring 31. The videos have been shared by President Zelensky on his profiles. The murder weapon is, again, an S300 anti-aircraft projectile converted into a ground attack missile. With this strategy of terror, Vladimir Putin’s regime, already wanted and captured for war crimes, is increasingly emptying the territories of Donbas that escape its control, but without this having any impact on the front.
The location of this market in that city is known to all, as are its opening hours. Russia knows this because it has informants on the ground. Two months ago he destroyed a crowded pizzeria in Kramatorsk and today a market. They are not missed attacks, but perfectly chosen ones. With the massive bombardment of large stores in the outskirts, the civilian population can only get supplies in these stores to eat. Since the invasion began, Z troops have spent enormous resources not only fighting Ukrainian resistance, but also fearing and punishing the local population. This city is a few kilometers from Bakhmut, reduced to rubble by the Russian army after eight months of fighting.
The bombing of the Kostiantinivka market, so common in Russian tactics in Syria, where they used to attack bread queues, just like Assad’s aircraft, joins other massacres perpetrated by the Moscow regime in the cities of Donbas that it does not control , such as Kramatorsk (whose attack on the station on April 22, 2022 caused 56 deaths as they fled the city with two Tochka-U missiles), Sloviansk, where it is a rare week that a rain of missiles does not fall in the center of the city, and Pokrovsk, where a few weeks ago another projectile destroyed a hotel and a pizzeria frequented by aid workers and journalists.
Russian failure at the front is always accompanied by new massacres of civilians in the rear. The Ukrainian advances in Zaporizhia do not bring good news for Russia. This is the Kremlin’s way of diverting attention from a reality that is difficult to accept.
Putin’s objectives are not being met and it already seems impossible that they will ever be met. After a year and a half of war, kyiv has not fallen, Zelensky is not in a Siberian prison, and NATO has not disappeared. On the contrary, all of his enemies are stronger today than in February 2022. Russian propaganda blamed the bombing on a Ukrainian plane, belonging to that aircraft that the same propagandists long ago claimed to have destroyed. It is the same plot twist that they invented with the downing of flight MH17 in 2014. For them it is always the enemy who kills his own people.