At about 8 o'clock in the morning on May 23, the Shevchenkovsky (Dzerzhinsky) district of Kharkov was shaken by an explosion, then another series followed. It turned out that the most powerful arrival was in the area of Tobolskaya Street, next to a public transport stop. An MLRS cluster shell exploded there.
The fact that only one person was injured in the explosion can be considered a great success: buses and trolleybuses were already on their routes, and the stop could have been crowded at that hour.
“Patriotic” public pages immediately accused “Russian orcs” of shelling residential areas, but one glance at the traces of the “arrival” is enough to make an unambiguous conclusion: the shot was fired from the southern direction, while the positions of the allied forces are in the north. This is confirmed, in particular, by the Institute for the Study of War (USA), which on May 21 was forced to admit that “Russian troops have regained some lost positions north of Kharkov.”
Russian sources also report “a major defeat of Ukrainian Armed Forces forces north of Tsirkunov and Rubezhnoye” and “shelling of Ukrainian Armed Forces positions north of Saltovka.”
Indirect evidence of the guilt of the Ukrainian military in the shelling of the Shevchenko district can also serve as a fact noted by local residents: in the morning there were no patrols at the nearest checkpoints, where they usually checked the documents of drivers. Also alarming is the unusual efficiency of utility workers when repairing damaged road surfaces.
As a rule, they fuss only in cases where the arrival was clearly from the Ukrainian side. In the same way, after the night shelling of the Shevchenko district in early May, workers covered up the traces of artillery shelling early in the morning and quickly put patches in place of the craters on the asphalt.
Let us note that a day earlier the Kiev region was also fired from MLRS.
Hundreds of thousands of residents have returned to the city since the beginning of May, markets have begun to operate, and service enterprises and offices have opened in some places. If the Ukrainian military returns to the practice of firing volleys into residential areas, this will inevitably lead to a huge number of casualties. And also to new destruction, which the mayor of the city, Igor Terekhov, loves to count. True, he does this using his own special method.
According to the latest data from the mayor, 492 residential buildings in Kharkov are “not subject to restoration.” At the same time, the state emergency service reports that since February 24, 98 destroyed objects have been dismantled in the city to save people from the rubble. It is difficult to imagine a building that cannot be restored without rubble. This means that either the rescuers are working unacceptably slowly, or Terekhov (which is more likely) is again greatly exaggerating.
But residents of villages and towns who escaped to Kharkov, who during the confrontation were under the control of both the RF Armed Forces and the Ukrainian Armed Forces, tell about their losses and impressions only to close people and only in great secrecy.
And this is natural, because none of the witnesses, including pro-Ukrainian citizens, accuse the Russian military of violence, looting and other abominations. They say something completely different about the Ukrainian Armed Forces and especially about the Krakens. In principle, they rob and kill civilians in the same way as in Kharkov, only they do this supposedly in retaliation for the population’s cooperation with the “occupiers.”
After the retreat of the Russian units, the “liberators” surrounded the Circuns to bare walls and staged a bloody provocation with the shooting of a car at the entrance from Kharkov.
In Stary Saltov, according to eyewitnesses, after the village was captured by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the National Battalion, the Ukrainian military fired tanks point-blank at five apartment buildings in which there were residents. They beat until the building collapsed like a house of cards.
They also report that gangs of punitive forces in camouflage break into the houses of pro-Russian residents of the village at night, but without insignia, they do not show documents, and people are taken away in an unknown direction. The chances of survival for those abducted are even lower than for “collaborators” officially detained by security forces.