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You folks were super enthusiastic about my posting more on Mastodon, so let's try this. RT/boost and let's see if there's interest in a regular #Ukraine thread! Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands. For the last year, I've been tracking a notorious Russian unit known for its role in killing 100s of civilians. This past month we published how we found them. 32 comments
You can see on the case how it starts with the serial number 9M317... the 9M317 is a missile used for what is called the Buk missile system. ... the same system that shot down MH17 in eastern Ukraine back in 2014, killing hundreds of civilians. So we need to back up and provide some context here: On a summer day in 2014, a civilian commercial flight was traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur. A Russian unit supplied the missile system that shot down the plane in Eastern Ukraine. All 298 passengers/crew died. Having departed from Amsterdam, it was, as one Dutch person told me, The Netherland's version of 9/11. The Joint Investigation Team led by the Dutch concluded that the Russian unit that supplied the missile system was known as the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade. It was this unit that we were trying to find. Were they fighting again in Ukraine this past year? No one knew. Like so many leads, our original lead in Novyi Bykiv was a dead end. The 53rd hadn't been there. But the question remained: where had the 53rd been? Had they been active somewhere in Ukraine? Over the past year we cultivated intelligence, law enforcement, military sources everywhere: the U.S., Ukraine, Poland, France, + the Netherlands. We heard vaguely that the 53rd had been in the Kharkiv region. When we went to #Kharkiv, one of the local generals introduced us to the prosecutor for the region, Oleksandr Philchakov. He met us at a dark, underground former beer hall converted into a military HQ. He said that the #Russian #53rdBrigade had been in a town called #Izium. A major breakthrough happened when the Ukrainian forces pushed the Russian military out of the Kharkiv region in the fall. The Russians left behind sensitive intelligence showing their units in Izium. And on the list, on the 17th line, was a listing for the 53rd Brigade. We got our hands on that list in January. There had been little evidence of the 53rd until then. The 53rd Brigade specializes in anti-aircraft missile systems. They do not fight on the front lines, where open-source photos for e.g. can be used to provide information about a unit's activities and whereabouts. So the 53rd was MUCH HARDER TO FIND. There was only one more thing for us to do: go to the address on the Russian military document. The 53rd's former headquarters were in Izium, on Partisan street. In a warehouse once used to store chocolates for distribution in eastern Ukraine. And not only that, shortly before we aired the story, Putin signed a new decree about the 53rd Brigade. Apparently unconcerned about how it would look, he ordered that the unit be given a new honorary designation, of 'Guards', a term reserved for supposedly elite Russian units. You can read and listen to our 11 mo investigation into the 53rd Brigade here. These stories, after they're done, may look like they're relatively simple, but I spoke to ~100 sources for this story (most of whom unhelpful) before being able to land it! https://www.npr.org/2023/03/18/1162659715/russian-53rd-anti-aircraft-missile-brigade-ukraine-mh17  @timkmak Thank you so much for this thread. I will certainly promote you here and will use your posts here to entice people over to Mastodon from Twitter. I have been waiting and looking for Ukrainian embedded Journos here. Very glad you have done this and it is great content and an important story. Thanks.   @timkmak Yeah, Tim, don't trash the pupper for having a good sense of who the good guys are, man. For all you know, he has a bottle of sriracha saved up for you!  @timkmak thank you for this. As someone who had loved ones on MH17, and who knew many more, thank you. The entire community was hit so hard by this and we absolutely want to see all involved brought to justice, however unlikely it may seem. This brings us one step closer. Thank you |
Gregory's Server
In May of last year, I came across these missile cases in a small village called Novyi Bykiv.
They were sitting outside a rec center in an area that had been liberated by Ukrainian forces just weeks before.