Dispatch for August 4

The Russian Investigative Committee announced that it would open a Regional Board in Donbas with investigative departments in the occupied cities. Almost all major governmental agencies are ready to open their branches in the occupied territories. Earlier, the Russian Ministry of the Interior announced that it would open its branches in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

Donetsk axis: 

• The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine reported that the Ukrainian military had to retreat from the Butovka mine on the Avdiivka Axis. Ukraine still controls Avdiivka, the fighting for it continues.
• Regarding Pisky, the information is still contradictory.

Kherson axis:

• The Ukraine Battle Map project has published the new map of August 4. Comparing it with the previous map of July 4, we note that the front line in the Kherson axis has not changed much over the month. The pro-Russian forces captured Kyselivka, while the Ukrainian forces captured Pravdyne

Donetsk shelling:

At the moment, we have little doubt that it was a Ukrainian shelling, during which at least two shells hit.

One of the shells hit the Donbas Palace hotel which is located in the center of Donetsk. There are fatalities among the civilian population. At least one individual in a military uniform was also killed. We believe that there was a military target in this hotel - a high-ranking officer or a top official of the occupation administration. A photo of the hotel parking lot (expensive cars marked with the letter Z and with tinted windows) indirectly confirms our conclusion.

Judging by photos of the aftermath of the strike, we assume the shell was fired from the north-west.  

The second facility struck was the Donetsk Opera House in which a funeral for DNR Colonel Olga Kachura was underway. In the photographs a “Ural” truck towing a howitzer intended for use in the funeral procession can be seen parked near the building (the howitzer’s gun carriage is draped in red cloth). Despite its ceremonial appearance, the howitzer is a legitimate military target. According to the U.N., a funeral with a large number of military attendees is a military target, and an attack would not violate standards of international humanitarian law.     

Amnesty International (AI) report: in our opinion the report is accurate from a factual point of view; however, the way it was presented was extremely unfortunate due to its slanted perspective. For comparison purposes, we can look at the Human Rights Watch report published earlier which states at the very beginning that neither warring side has taken sufficient steps to ensure the safety of the civilian population; for example, by deploying military assets close to residential buildings. AI, in its report, gives the impression that this is common practice only for the Ukrainian side. This, of course, is not true.     

There are several cases described in the AI report itself. Some of them are intentionally worded as obscurely as possible, clearly to not divulge the informants. We were able to verify some of them (e.g. strike to Bakhmut on June 18). Russian forces attacked military trucks, which were parked near a residential building. The house was damaged, the inhabitants were injured. The essence of the AI claims is that the Ukrainian side has not taken sufficient steps to secure the residents of this house. In theory, there are some measures that could be taken: warn residents, post guards near a civilian facility, dig trenches etc. This is exactly what AI is talking about; however, the problem is that the report was made only on one side of the war, which in this case looks as incorrect as possible - and, accordingly, caused outrage on the Ukrainian side. The Russian side immediately took advantage of this: the Twitter account of the Russian embassy in the UK published a screenshot of the report's title - with the first two points about the deployment of Ukrainian military facilities. However, if you open the full report, you can see that there is a third point: such violations in no way justify indiscriminate Russian attacks, which result in countless civilian casualties. In any case, it is worth remembering that such reports on violations of international humanitarian law are no reason to equalize Russia and Ukraine. Russia is attacking, Ukraine is defending.

In the morning, Russian forces fired on Mykolaiv with Smerch MLRS. According to the head of the Mykolaiv regional military administration, Vitaly Kim, residential buildings were damaged; one of the tail sections hit the roadway, another hit the sidewalk.

At night, Nikopol was shelled twice with Grad MLRS. According to the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional administration, Valentyn Riznichenko, they hit multiple residential areas: 1 house was destroyed, almost 50 were damaged, and dozens of non-residential structures were damaged. 2 power lines were broken, more than 3 thousand citizens were left without electricity for several hours. Preliminary, there are no killed or injured.

At night, Odessa was hit with an Onyx anti-ship missile from Crimea. According to the Ukrainian Operational Command "South", the missile exploded in the air on approach and did not hit the target.

Oleksiy Arestovych, the adviser to the head of the Presidential Administration, claims that the true intention of the Russian troops is not the eastern regions of Ukraine. He says: “The goal of all the offensives in the Donetsk and Luhansk directions is to force us to transfer reserves there so that we do not transfer them to the direction of real danger, where a major offensive is planned ... the real events will begin within a week or so.”

To the west of Berlin, in the Grunwald district, a forest fire rages after an explosion at an ammunition depot. The warehouse was used by the police to store and dispose of unexploded munitions from the Second World War, which are still found during construction. The cause of the explosion is being investigated, there are no reports of casualties yet. The fire has not yet been controlled. Railway traffic was interrupted in the vicinity and a section of autobahn 115 was blocked.

The BBC has released a podcast with a Ukrainian volunteer who was kept in custody in Olenivka. Of important note, according to her, the facility was extremely overpopulated, it had been designed to detain from 100 up to150 people, and many times more prisoners were held there.

The second wave of mobilization has begun in occupied Luhansk; according to some reports, there is an order to recruit 7,000 people by August 18th.

The Ukrainian side posted a video showing a Ukrainian drone dropping several projectiles at once, a kind of carpet bombing.

In Mykolaiv, the court released Yuri Arbatsky on bail. He is accused of informing the Russians about the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In court, he explained his actions by the fact that teaching in Russian was canceled at his daughter's school.

The occupying authorities in Kherson promise to open Antonivskyi road bridge as early as next week. According to Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnulin, active work is underway to restore the structure.

Meanwhile on Russia’s Sakhalin island, where authorities earlier announced that they would help rebuild Shakhtarsk in Donetsk region, a resident of a decrepit house in the village of Shakhtyorsk threw a shoe at the head of the Uglegorsk district, Dmitry Tsukanov, so that he would pay attention to her misfortunes.