DISINFO: Ukraine carried out an attack on a nursing home in Sudzha
SUMMARY
On 1 February, an alleged war crime occurred in the Russian district town of Sudzha, which has been occupied by Ukrainian troops since August 2024.
[...]the Ministry of Defence in Moscow stated that it had evidence that a rocket fired by the 19th missile brigade of the Ukrainian armed forces from the Sumy area hit the boarding school. The Russian air defence system apparently recorded the launch of the rocket.
Much suggests that Saturday's incident was indeed a Ukrainian provocation. The circumstances fit very well with the previous patterns of likely Ukrainian provocations and false flag actions. They all – Bucha, Kramatorsk, Mariupol, Konstantinovka – occurred just when the West was about to decide on further military and financial support for the Kyiv regime.
RESPONSE
Unsubstantiated claims about an alleged Ukrainian attack on a nursing home and shelter in Sudzha, Russia.
At least four people died in the city of Sudzha on the 1st of February 2025, in the Russian region of Kursk, which is currently controlled by Ukrainian troops. According to the Ukrainian statement, a Russian glide bomb hit a school boarding school used as emergency accommodation. Four other residents have been injured, and the condition of a further 84 people is satisfactory.
Contrary to both articles' assertions, evidence supports Ukraine's version of the attack: The Ukrainian Air Force provided calculations of the projectile's flight path, indicating it was a guided bomb dropped from an aircraft east of Sudzha. This aligns with known Russian tactics of bombing civilian areas. The available evidence does not support the article's portrayal of the incident as clear Western propaganda, like from the German television channel MDR. Both articles dismiss Ukrainian statements and evidence without providing any counter-evidence, demonstrating a biased perspective that ignores information about the attack.
On the allegedly "staged" provocations/fakes in the Ukrainian cities of Bucha, Mariupol and Kramatorsk, these have already been broadly addressed.
1) Russia's claims that video footage showing dead bodies on the streets of Bucha is staged have been fact-checked and debunked by the BBC, Bellingcat, The Atlantic Council, Mediazona, the Insider, Sky News, the New York Times and others.
The Human Rights Watch has collected accounts of violence against civilians in Bucha. See the full debunk here.
2) The facts of the Russian bombing of the maternity ward in Mariupol, taking place on 9 March 2022, are quickly corroborated; the attack has been carefully documented with numerous pictures from several sources – professional news photographers, social media updates and forensic investigators. Manuals for open source investigation of Russian troop movements are easily available. See the full debunk here.
3) Pro-Russian disinformation narrative trying to attribute responsibility for the missile attack on Ukrainian civilians in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk to Ukrainian forces.
Contrary to pro-Kremlin media claims, quite to the opposite many facts indicate that Russian forces attacked the Kramatorsk railway station itself with a Tochka-U missile, killing over 57 waiting civilians and injuring over 114 civilians, according to the Governor of Donetsk Region as of 11 April 2022.
See our guide to deciphering pro-Kremlin disinformation around Putin's war and read our account of the Kremlin's intention to annihilate Ukraine here.