During the overnight hours of July 28-29, local time, rockets struck a detention facility in Yelenovka, about 23 km southwest of downtown Donetsk, where the D.P.R. militia was holding 193 Ukrainian POWs ahead of them going on trial for war crimes. According to a statement issued this morning by the Russian Defense Ministry, 50 Ukrainians died, 48 in the blast while 2 more died later of their injuries. About half of the survivors were wounded and are reported to be receiving medical treatment. Both the Russians and D.P.R. officials have maintained that the strike was carried out using U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets and was a deliberate attempt to kill Ukrainian prisoners, reported to be members of the Azov Battalion, who were preparing to testify to the crimes of the Kiev regime.
Ukraine’s military denied the accusation, claiming that the strike had been launched by Russian forces with the intention of framing Ukraine for war crimes and to “hide the torture of prisoners and executions” at the detention site, NBC reported yesterday. “The Russian enemy continues its propaganda methods of conducting an information war in order to accuse the Armed Forces of Ukraine of shelling civilian infrastructure and the population, thus hiding its own insidious actions,” a statement from Ukraine’s armed forces said July 29.
Moscow has called on the United Nations and the Red Cross to investigate, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, “in the interests of conducting an objective investigation.”
