Fact Check: Ryan McBeth claims that the DPR shelled themselves in Donetsk

🔴Fact Check

Original News: Ryan McBeth claims that the DPR forces shelled themselves in Donetsk city

Credits to: Michael Kobs and Adam Larson

Article has been updated - 6/10

Make sure to read Adam's post

Fact:

In a recent video from a popular Pro-Ukrainian military analyst Ryan McBeth, he claims that the shelling that took place in Donetsk city on 19th September was done by DPR forces who shelled themselves. This is not true for many reasons.

Explaining how the submunitions shown below work
How these submunition work.

Why Ryan is wrong

The argument Ryan makes in the video is wrong. What he calls the "arrow of debris" is not debris from the crater. It is primarily a window frame that happened to land there after the store was destroyed. And that is not what is meant by the field manual.

If he had understood his manual a little better, he would have noticed that the pressure of the explosion goes mainly to the side and little to the front. The pressure going forward damaged the pavement exactly where the rest of the fragments is now buried in the road.

About the missing pavement, we find very little near the hole, that is, where he thinks the "Arrow of debris" is pointing. In fact, we find more such scree on the north side of the crater. Nevertheless, the fragmentation pattern is a much better and quite definite indication.

We have about this situation. The pink torus is the warhead with the fragments. And in the background we have the wall of the store. In about this position, the detonator would hit the ground and ignite the explosive charge of the warhead.

A few microseconds later, the first fragments of the warhead would hit the pavement behind the projectile and engrave that familiar sun pattern. NOTE that no fragments of the warhead can hit the ground in the forward direction. Only a few shrapnel of the projectile will hit there.

Later, the torus of warhead fragments has spread to the wall of the store, leaving a band/strip of characteristic traces there as well. As Adam correctly mentioned, the trajectory of the projectile is perpendicular to this band while scratches and long holes point to the origin.

Another example

We now have a pretty clear pattern on the pavement. In the pink area we see the radiating traces of many fragments, in the green area we cannot detect any comparable traces. If there were traces there, then there should be few or no traces on the north side. If not it could be a vertical impact. In this case, the fragmentation pattern would be like concentric circles around the impact site. In this case here, the visible traces have a distinct kidney shape. I.e. the shell hit at an angle of inclination and no fragmentation traces are to be expected in the green area.

The pattern of casualties tells the same story

If we apply Ryan's logic that it the impact from that crater he showed went forward which it should, it won't make sense for this place shown below to get a huge fireball. This was possible because of Crater shown above which came from Northwest direction as shown above.

This proves that the shelling was done by Ukrainian forces. The AFU has been shelling Donetsk since 2014 and shells it everyday a lot of times mainly from the direction of Adeevka and Donetsk Airport. We asked Ryan about this on Twitter but we still didn't get any clear answer. If we do we will update this article.

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