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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In the ancient and current doctrine of the law of culpability for killing, the Latin term mens rea  is required to be proved beyond reasonable doubt,  in parallel with proof of actus reus. In short, the intention in mind to kill (aka motive) must be in combination with the hands-on act of killing itself.

In the public media trial of the Russian military of guilt for the air raid which hit part of the Okhmatdet Children’s Hospital in Kiev on Monday morning, July 8, the US, NATO and Ukrainian charge is that a Russian missile struck the hospital and exploded, killing 27, and injuring 17 out of more than 1,200 patients and staff in the hospital at the time; 4 children have been counted among the dead, 7 among the wounded.  

The Russian military reports for the day, including Colonel Cassad by Boris Rozhin, indicated that the targets of the Russian missile strikes in the Kiev area were military industry plants and,  as part of the electric war,  at least three electric substations in the city grid.   DTEK, the Ukrainian power utility, has acknowledged in several tweets that its power stations had been hit and were being assessed by DTEK engineers for repair.   

Motive and intention to target the Artyom (Artem) military plant in Kiev   is officially acknowledged by  Russian officials. It is the third attack on the site reported by Ukrainian officials.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova, the Okhmatdet hospital had been struck by a US-made, Norway-supplied NASAMS air defence missile, fired by a Ukrainian battery attempting to protect the Artyom (Artem) plant. “Many eyewitnesses and other sources have already confirmed that a Western-made NASAMS surface-to-air missile hit a building of the Okhmatdet Hospital for Children in Kiev. Officials on Bankovaya Street [Zelensky regime headquarters] immediately started blaming Russia for deliberately killing children. However, no one said that the Artyom Plant is located next to the affected clinic, and that Defense Ministry buildings and military warehouses are also located next door. Certainly, no one said that pro-Bandera supporters are deliberately deploying air defence systems in residential areas, using civilians as a human shield. The Kiev junta has been using purely civilian enterprises for military purposes for a long time, either using them to assemble and repair military equipment or to store Western-made weapons and military equipment.”  

The Russian representative at the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, currently rotational president of the UN Security Council, told a special council session that the strike on the hospital had been a Ukrainian one, not a Russian one.     He added:  “The X-101 missile would have done a lot more damage to the building it hit [Min 6:52]…if it had been a Russian missile, there would have been nothing left of the building and the children and most of the adults would have been killed rather than wounded [Min 8:20]” Like Zakharova, Nebenzya identified military industrial targets. The two Russian officials have not identified the electric war targets.

They are not lying; they are telling less than the full truth. When that is understood from all the available evidence, there is no mens rea. No conviction in a western court of law. The prosecution’s case is dismissed.

In war, especially in propaganda war, there is no such thing as independence.

United Nations (UN) organizations from the UN Secretary-General and his office down the UN line, are not independent.  In the current war they have taken the US-NATO side.   

In a briefing by Danielle Bell, a UN official in Kiev on Tuesday, the day after the air raid, she claimed “Analysis of the video footage and assessment made at the incident site indicates a high likelihood that the children’s hospital suffered a direct hit rather than receiving damages due to an intercepted weapons system. Of course, as was said earlier, this must be investigated. At the time of the attack, 670 child patients, mainly inpatients, were there together with more than a thousand medical staff.”   

Bell, a Canadian national who has served beside US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq,   did not say what she meant by “direct hit” and did not distinguish between warhead detonation, shrapnel wounds, and blast impacts. When prompted for more evidence, Bell said: “We haven’t determined.”

In a British or American courtroom, that is the end of proof of guilt beyond reasonable doubt. The defence lawyer would then announce to judge and jury the prosecution has failed and move for summary dismissal.

But the UN official announced differently, conclusively: “We’ve assessed the factors that suggest the likelihood that it was a direct hit of a KH-101 [X-101 is the Cyrillic acronym translated into English] missile launched by the Russian Federation. The factors suggesting that it was a direct hit are based on video footage, which shows the technical specification of the type of weapon that was used. It shows the weapon directly impacting the hospital rather than being intercepted in the air. And thirdly, my military, our military expert, visited the site yesterday and observed damages at the site that were consistent with a direct hit.”   

To measure “consistent with a direct hit” in a homicide prosecution requires clinical and autopsy evidence of the cause of death or injury to individuals. In the Kiev hospital case, to date there is no evidence of fragmentation metal or cluster elements from the X-101 warhead causing either death or injury in the hospital. No comparison has been published openly by the Ukrainians of X-101 warhead fragmentation and NASAMS warhead fragmentation.

Top – X-101; below – NASAMS

The warhead payload of the X-101 has been reported at 400 kg of high explosive fragmentation of metal elements.   The warhead of the NASAMS missile is 20 kg of explosive.

Physical wounding by flying glass or collapsing structures is consistent with blast from outside the hospital. Wounds by warhead shrapnel identified in the bodies of the casualties by X-ray or CT and MRI scans can be compared for the source of the metal to distinguish between the X-101 and the NASAMS. This has not been done by the Ukrainian side. Without such evidence – protected by chain of custody to prevent tampering, substitutions of metal, and fakery – the prosecution fails.

In her presentation for the UN, Bell omitted the medical evidence. Her military expert went unnamed, his evidence unexamined. This is called hearsay in a British or American court. For proof of actus reus, the judge will direct the jury that without circumstantial corroboration and cross-examination,  the expert’s testimony has next to no evidential value in a homicide prosecution.

Ivan Katchanovski is a professor at the University of Ottawa with a long record of investigations of Ukrainian war events, starting with the Maidan protests of early 2014 leading to the putsch of February 21, 2014. He has issued this new forensic assessment. “My preliminary research-based analysis: Videos, photos, reports & other evidence suggest that one of Russian Kh 101 missiles in indiscriminate strike hit 2 electric substations in children’s hospital territory in Kyiv & partially destroyed nearby two story hospital building killing two people there & blast impact damaged one of main hospital buildings. Akhmetov’s energy company [DTEK] reported that its 3 transformer substations in Kyiv, including two on hospital territory, were destroyed by Russian missiles. Videos also show simultaneous strikes by 6 Russian missiles of Artem [Artyom] factory involved in missile production some 600 meters away. Claims by Russian & Ukrainian governments, which are reported by media at face value and taken by many social media users at face values, appear to be false. Contrary to Russian government claim, this missile strike was not from Ukrainian NASAMS air defense. Contrary to Ukrainian government claim, children were not targeted, and 11 out of 13 Russian missiles were not shot down. Missile strike in daylight in densely populated area, especially in children hospital area can be classified as indiscriminate and violation of international law. Research-based analysis is preliminary and based on publicly available evidence at this time.”  

Source: https://x.com/
In additional tweet presentations, Katchanovski presented visual and audio evidence of X-101 arrivals in the vicinity of the hospital.  

Katchanovski’s conclusion of law does not follow from his evidence. It is as hypothetical as Nebenzya’s statement at the Security Council — “if it had been a Russian missile, there would have been nothing left of the building and the children and most of the adults would have been killed rather than wounded.” Hypotheses about mens rea may contribute in court to the jury’s understanding of the likelihood of guilty motive or intention to kill. The hypotheses don’t contribute to conclusions of fact and truthfulness for actus reus.  

In a hospital staffed by hundreds of nurses and doctors, the absence of a single testimony of cause of death or injury is more than peculiar. It is concealment and cover-up.

So what exactly happened?

Sources who are experts in civil electrical engineering and a NATO veteran who specializes in electric warfare on the battlefield were asked this question.

The answers:

“The substations that were destroyed are of the distribution variety. They are smaller than the generation and transmission infrastructure focused on by the Russian electric war campaign to date. This tells us that the Russian General Staff are now homing in on local electrical equipment. In DTEK’s videos and published statements, it is obvious that the DTEK personnel are reading from prepared statements focusing on the hospital attack, not on the importance of the network of government and military offices supplied by the substations. It is likely that the MVA (megavolt ampere) ratings of the substations that were hit are much higher than the demand rating of the hospital.”

“The Russians were either targeting larger substations iin the vicinity which can be seen on the infrastructure map or targeting the smaller substation in front of the hospital, or the Ministry of Infrastructure which is only about 110 metres south of the hospital substation. When the hospital substation was struck, everything tripped out all around, including the ministry and who knows what else.”

“The transformers in the substation shown in the pictures and videos of the hospital strike serve the hospital and the surrounding buildings The others shown on the maps of the area are for buildings such as the Ukrainian Ministry of Infrastructure. In capacity, these substations range from 2KMA to 1.6MVA and step 10,000 volts down to 400 volts for utilization in the buildings. The building east of the hospital substation in the pictures was not hit by an antiaircraft missile. The damage is too great.  DTEK has said that three other substations were hit in Kiev. They have named the districts, but not the locations; the pictures make it nearly impossible to determine their location precisely. This information tells us that distribution transformers were intentionally targeted; they were not collateral damage.”

“At worst, the Russians intended to strike at the electrical installations and missed, but not really, and not by much. The building next to the substation was hit, not the hospital proper, nor the cardiology clinic to the north. The substation or the nearby ministry was the target. The hospital took blast damage from the strike and possibly from the NASAMS missile. Nebenzya definitely left out what the target was — but the damage to the building beside the substation appears too great to be from an AA missile.  It’s too much of a coincidence that the substations and ministry building were close by.”

“The smallness of the substations that were hit indicates that the Russians are now focusing on targeting distribution as well as transmission and generation. This takes the risk of negatively impacting the nuclear power plants out of the equation. It also stretches Ukrainian utility resources thinner. With this in mind, targeting the hospital substation makes sense. It forces the Ukrainians to deploy scarce manpower and materiel (technicians, portable substations and generators) to keep the hospital going. It forces prioritization on a more local level with all of the system stresses that will cause.”

ELECTRIC TRANSFORMERS AND SUBSTATIONS IN THE VICINITY OF THE HOSPITAL

Okhmatdet Hospital, centre, is surrounded by power transformers and substations. The largest capacity substation in the vicinity, with 32 megavolt amperes (MVA), is 1.6kM.

KIEV ELECTRICITY INFRASTRUCTURE MAP, DETAIL OF HOSPITAL AREA

Click on source for details of location, capacity: https://openinframap.org/

BEFORE THE RUSSIAN AIR RAID OF JULY 8, HOSPITAL AND ADJACENT ELECTRIC SUBSTATION

December 17, 2021 – the electric substation is in the foreground, centre, the main hospital building is behind. Source: https://ua.korrespondent.net/

Satellite picture showing the locations of the substation in front of the hospital (red arrow), the building that was hit (blue arrow) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Infrastructure (yellow arrow).

AFTER THE AIR RAID OF JULY 8

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news  A video clip issued by the Ukrainian state emergency service of site damage and rescue operations can be viewed here.  

Small DTEK substation confirmed as destroyed by DTEK.

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