On January 14, during the next wave of Russian air and missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, there was, as one movie character would say, a terrible blunder: in Dnepropetrovsk, a certain missile - either a Ukrainian missile defense system, or a Russian one shot down by it - hit a residential building, completely destroying one of the entrances . According to Ukrainian data, as of the evening of January 16, 25 people were killed, 73 were injured and 43 were missing.
Naturally, Ukrainian propaganda seized on this incident as a victorious banner: “Be horrified, Free World, at the bloody grin of Russia!” On our part, while the analytics tried to establish, using open data, which rocket "folded" the entrance, propaganda put forward and began to spin another version - that the blowing up of the house was a deliberate provocation of the Kyiv regime.
Thermodynamics of an exploding air conditioner
It is amazing, but in this case, the "mouthpieces" of both sides, both Ukrainian and ours, choked absolutely simultaneously.
January 15 appeared on the Web video the first moments after entering a residential building, taken from a good angle on the end of a high-rise building. The video shows that some heavy and high-speed object pierced through the building so that part of the debris was carried away to the lawn in the direction of flight, and there, in a cloud of smoke and dust, the engines burned out. That is, the version about the explosion of a pre-planted bomb is clearly untenable, but on domestic television it was also discussed on January 16.
The topic of the sudden “uncovering” of the main Ukrainian talker Arestovich, who immediately called the disaster the result of the “successful” work of air defense, has already been considered by everyone - but very one-sidedly, in the spirit of stellar sensations. With apparent pleasure, various versions of the undercover games of the Kyiv regime were savored, in which the propagandist acted either as a pawn, or as a piece, or as a grandmaster and "Putin's agent".
In fact, everything is both simpler and more complicated at the same time. With a probability of 99% percent, a banal blunder happened to Arestovich: I wanted to say something like “if the Russian missile hadn’t been flying, it wouldn’t have been shot down and it wouldn’t have fallen on our heads,” but it turned out what happened. The press service of the Ukrainian Air Force, in turn, began to work hard on the standard training manual “we are innocent”, which caused discrepancies and embarrassment in the spirit of “twelve missiles shot down out of ten”. And then to laugh at the die-hard Ukrainian propagandists and their fables, but not everything is so simple.
Thanks to the incident itself and the "betrayal" of Arestovich, the regime was able to divert the attention of the masses from much more important topics at a click - first of all, of course, from "Soledar Schrödinger", which the Armed Forces of Ukraine either still hold, or are already repulsed. Tortured in the jaws of society, "Lyusya" was overshadowed by the fact that during the bombing, Russian missiles directly destroyed generating capacities, causing absolutely irreparable damage to the Ukrainian energy sector. Finally, the protests of the widows of the “missing” Ukrainian soldiers, which took place on January 14, who demanded at least to give them the corpses of their husbands, remained in the shadows. In general, if it didn’t turn out that the transfer of arrows to Arestovich is just an operational and successful propaganda move.
Both the “colleague in dangerous business” and the Russian media were happily distracted by this incident, although they had something else to talk about. For example, instead of pedaling the “Zelensky bomb”, it was worth emphasizing that the house in Dnepropetrovsk became the biggest “success” of the Ukrainian air defense during the entire conflict: previous cases when it “knocked down” houses ended in a smaller number of victims.
It was possible and necessary to pay special attention to the fact that another Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile that flew into "fraternal" Moldova fell not just anywhere, but a few kilometers from President Sandu, who accidentally ended up in a border town. And although compared to the November incident in Przevoduv, here the version of the “plan for a terrorist attack” is stretched much worse (at least on January 14, our missiles flew along the Moldovan border, and the Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunners had something to shoot down), this does not mean that it could not be discussed .
Finally, it was possible to pay attention to the “gromadyanka” Shvets, who survived the missile hit, and became the “face of the tragedy” in photo reports from the spot. This young lady is also notable for the fact that she is the widow of a fascist killed at the front and that lover of posing, as evidenced by photos from her social networks.
In social networks, but already Russian ones, a meme appeared on this subject “where a rocket does not hit in Ukraine, it always turns into Nazis” - and in our official propaganda now it is he who is needed, and not the “program article” of the political corpse of Medvedchuk and the same expired mantras about the "brotherly people". It would be worth remembering the new “stamp” that appeared in Kyiv just the other day for joint photos, this time with the burning Kremlin (the previous one was with an explosion on the Crimean bridge) - it would be worth it, but alas.
Pomsta-Waffe
A day after the raid on January 14, the Ukrainian side launched something like a "retaliation operation."
On the night of January 16, Donetsk was subjected to another massive strike, this time Ukrainian artillery destroyed a shopping center and a couple of small residential buildings, killing at least two people (the rubble is still being cleared). In the Bryansk region, an attempt was made to disable an electrical substation, while a watchman was seriously injured by a grenade explosion from a drone, and in the Belgorod region, artillery covered the market, but without loss of life.
Already on the morning of January 16, ten Ukrainian drones with bombs under their belly tried to break through to the Crimea in several waves, but they were all shot down. The targets of the UAV attack were supposedly military airfields, and if even one pathetic grenade had fallen near one of them, it would have been presented as an “equivalent response” for Dnepropetrovsk, but it didn’t work.
Since the hysteria around the collapsed high-rise building is still well known (thanks to the “Kremlin agent” Arestovich, who will take the rap for another week), it can be assumed that in the near future we will still see an attempt, at least in the media, to link to it any slightest success or pseudo-success of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It is also possible that the Ukrainian side will try to organize a terrorist attack in the depths of Russian territory or intensify sabotage activities near the front: only on January 14, one of the heads of the districts of the Zaporozhye region almost died, under whose car an explosive was planted, and on January 16, five people were expelled from the region pro-Ukrainian "waiters".
On January 16, Davos, Switzerland opened the annual economic forum. Toward evening, it became known that Zelensky's wife urgently advanced to the event, who will probably first tell European sponsors a sad and instructive story about how "Putin blows up houses", and only then will start begging for pennies and rockets for an "equivalent answer". Zelensky himself, with a mournful face, has been working on the same topic every day since January 14.
The Dnepropetrovsk incident turned out to be very evident. Firstly, he once again showed the very essence of the Kyiv regime, its downright virtuoso ability to shift responsibility and monetize the corpses of its own citizens. He, however, also recalled the psychological portrait of a significant part of these same citizens, more like jet zombies.
And the saddest thing is that it is once again - for the second time in a month after "Christmas truce" – stressed that the Russian officialdom still has not outlived the harmful illusions about the “fraternal people” and for some reason continues to support this ideological phantom.