The Thursday night bombing of a prison in Olenivka, in the pro-Russian separatist region of Donetsk, sparked an avalanche of accusations and counter-accusations in the Russian and Ukrainian camps, accusing each other of a massacre which would have caused between 40 and 53 deaths.
Russia was the first to draw, declaring through its Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, that the Ukrainian forces “had launched rockets [américaines] HIMARS against a detention center near Olenivka”reports The Moscow Times.
According to Moscow, the prison housed Ukrainian prisoners of war and the death toll from the bombardment was 40 dead and 84 wounded. The authorities of the Donetsk People’s Republic – the pro-Russian separatist entity – assured that 53 prisoners had died in the attack, “but that no guard had been killed or injured”according to the website.
Ukraine immediately counter-attacked, denying any responsibility for the bombardment and ensuring that “Russian artillery had targeted the prison to cover up the fact that the detainees there had been ‘tortured and murdered’”écrit The Guardian. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba later accused Russia of “barbaric war crime”.
In his daily televised address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also said that “the attack on the occupiers in Olenivka [était] a deliberate war crime by the Russians, a mass slaughter of Ukrainian POWs”.
The Wagner group at the helm?
The Ukrainian army, for its part, assured that it had not launched “no rockets or artillery fire in the Olenivka area overnight and that it used Western high-precision weapons, such as the Himars system, only on Russian military targets”reports the Wall Street Journal.
The first images and videos of the attack all came from the Russian camp, and showed “a building almost completely destroyed and several corpses”according CNN. The American Channel “was able to geolocate the video of the shelling in an industrial zone located just over three kilometers from Olenivka”seeming to match the information also collected by the Ukrainian authorities.
The Washington Post points out that most of the prisoners held at Olenivka – if not all of them – “were members of the Azov regiment, who surrendered when Russian troops captured the town of Mariupol in May, after a two-month siege”. Their fate “had been the subject of intense negotiations on the exchange of prisoners between Moscow and Kyiv”adds the daily.
On Friday afternoon, Ukrainian intelligence drove home the point by claiming that “the attack on the prison was carried out by the private military group Wagner, whose members took part in the battle for control of the Donbass region”writes the European edition of Politico. According to Ukrainians, “the organization and implementation of the terrorist attack had not been validated by the leadership of the Russian Ministry of Defense”.