Google Earth data suggests Russia shelled Ukraine, say researchers
A new report suggests that Russia shelled Ukrainian towns from inside Russian territory.
The British-based investigative reporting group the Bellingcat Team, says that聽its research into聽a series of artillery strikes during the summer of 2014 with firing artillery rounds into Ukraine.
Bellingcat used publicly available satellite imagery from Google Earth to look at reported artillery strikes from between July 9 and September 5 of last year. During this period, the Ukrainian military lost control of swaths of its border territory.
The first battle in question occurred near the town of , where Ukrainian forces reported 330 artillery strikes, according to the Bellingcat Report. The other two battles observed took place on July 14 and July 16.
Part of the evidence Bellingcat discovered were a series of burn marks on the earth that would indicate had been installed just inside Russian territory near the village of Seleznev, some nine miles away, from the same day鈥檚 images that featured the first strike from July 14. In the satellite images taken before the attacks, there were no such burn marks at the alleged launch sites, according to the report.
The matches the trajectory of the artillery rounds the Bellingcat Team had determined using established military calculations that involve evaluating the type of crater the armament leaves, according to the report. The Bellingcat Team analyzed two different types of craters. One kind, they say, is caused by low-angle rounds that cause a diagonal spray of the earth from the center upon impact. The other kind is caused by a high angle impact, which leaves a triangular shaped crater. From these craters, the investigators concluded that the artillery fire had come from a聽south-south west trajectory, pointing them to the alleged firing position.
The Russian government has maintained for the entirety of the conflict that its military forces have not participated in any of the fighting. But this latest revelation seems to make the , reports the Guardian. In August 2014, the Guardian reported that a had crossed the border into Ukraine.聽
The next battle analyzed by Bellingcat took place in the . There, Ukrainian forces came under a heavy artillery barrage between July 14 and August 8, and when the team applied the same method to the more than 800 craters, they . Four of them were on Russian soil. Scorched earth was observed at these possible sites, as well as tire tracks, another possible sign of mobile artillery.
Using satellite imagery for calculating artillery trajectory based on crater depth is an imperfect science at best, and this alone would not be enough to prove Russian involvement. But the of burned farmland that match with the calculations that place the rocket launchers inside Russian territory make for a compelling case, notes the Guardian.
Stephen Johnson, a weapons expert at the Cranfield Forensic Institute at the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom told the Guardian, calculating artillery trajectory using only satellite imagery is, 鈥�.鈥�
鈥淭his does not mean there is no value to the method, but that any results must be considered with caution and require corroboration,鈥� Mr. Johnson told the Guardian. He also added that the most significant part of the report was the discovery of the purported firing positions.
