On the morning of Friday 29th April 2022, Russia announced as part of their daily briefing on their Telegram channel that "High-precision, long-range air-based weapons of the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed the production buildings of the Artyom missile and space enterprise in Kiev". It was implicit that this had occured in the preceding 24 hours. This strike coincided with the visit of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to Kiev, a day after his visit to Moscow.

Also on 29th April, Radio Svoboda - the Ukrainian arm of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty - announced that the Russian strike had claimed the life of RFE/RL journalist Vera Hyrych (also spelt Vira Gyrych/Ghyrych, from Ukrainian Віра Гирич) who was killed in her apartment building.

Hers was reportedly the only death; there were also some reported injuries. Kiev mayor Vitaly Klitschko posted a video on Telegram on the morning of 29th April from in front of her apartment building, a gaping hole clearly visible in the side of it at roughly street level, as well as numerous broken windows in its facade and that of adjoining buildings.

Reports of the strike described it as being on the Shevchenkivskyi District in Western Kiev. They do not mention that this is where the Artem/Artyom weapons plant (SJSHC Artem / Завод "Артем") is located (see below).

From the very few photographs showing the results of the strike on the factory, it is possible to see, by comparing images from Google Street View, that the strike was on the part of the factory close to Tatarska Street (highlighted in red on the map above), onto which street the factory has an entrance. Some video was shot showing the immediate aftermath.

Vera Hyrych's apartment isn’t visible on any of the Street View images. But the Street View images date from 2015; an image of the street from 2021 shows the new buildings:

Comparing photographs of Ms. Hyrych's damaged building, it is possible to recognise the balcony and window arrangement of the older building next to it in the Street View image from 2015:

If you follow the Street View link above and rotate the camera a little less than 180° anti-clockwise (video below), it is clear that Ms. Hyrych's apartment (marked on the map below) is on the other side of Tatarska St from the Artem plant buildings that were photographed burning.

This might seem to corroborate the Ukrainian version of events, that the apartment building was hit by a Russian missile, whether intentionally or otherwise. But the damage done to Ms. Hyrych's building is relatively minimal; the missiles that Russia fires would destroy the entire building. There are very few, if any, pictures available of the damage done to military installations by Russian strikes, but it must be considerable. This is a video showing a cruise missile hitting a Ukrainian special forces base in Khmelnitsky.

This is not to suggest that a cruise missile destroying a building wouldn't do a lot of damage to surrounding buildings, most notably destroying windows, and people could absolutely be hurt or even killed by flying glass. While it is possible that Ms. Hyrych could have been killed by flying glass, the reports of her death say that she was pulled from the rubble, meaning that she was killed by the missile that hit her building.

A year after Hyrych’s death, RFE published their own investigation into the missile strike, which quotes Ukrainian military experts who claim that it was a Russian X-101 missile that missed its target, and that they are not as precise as the Russian military would have you believe, sometimes impacting up to 100m away from the target. There are numerous videos of very accurate strikes, but even if we take the experts at their word and assume that it was a missile that went off course, the Artem plant was a legitimate military target, so it was arguably irresponsible not to evacuate residential buildings so close to it.

It’s impossible that only the bottom 2 or 3 floors of her building could be destroyed by a missile coming from above, doing little damage to the street between it and the Artem plant, but a cruise missile might come in at a low angle. Ms. Hyrych's apartment building is on the east side of the street and it was clearly struck on its west face, and although it seems implausible that the missile would have been fired by a Russian aircraft that was west of Kiev, the RFE report shows the flight path of the Tu-95 aircraft that they say fired the missile doing just that, flying around Kiev to the east and north, crossing into Belarus. It’s not clear how much of the flight path is that of the plane and how much is that of the missile. It still begs the question of why the missile was not more powerful - it seems like a big risk to fly a bomber all that way to deliver such a small, inaccurate blow.

More plausible is the possibility that the missile that hit Ms. Hyrych's building was a Ukrainian air defence missile that failed to stop an incoming Russian missile. Sadly, this exact scenario played out on the building next door to Ms. Hyrych's apartment a few months later. There are many reports of air defence missiles going off course - but not in the western media, of course. It has been suggested that this is probably because of the various different systems they have received from western countries, which the Ukrainians have very little time to learn to use, and which may be incompatible with one other, or simply ineffective. This photograph from Kiev, October 2022, shows the path of an air defence missile that has been launched and then gone straight back down to the ground (it is common to blur the foreground in such images, to avoid disclosing the location of the attack or the photographer):

But this still begs the question of why the missile would hit the building's facade and take out the bottom floors, rather than hit the roof (as happened in the second incident) or the road.

Look at the image below, taken once the road had been cleared - how could a missile coming from above have done that damage to the facade of the building without also damaging the street? Or if it impacted at a very shallow angle, how did it avoid damaging the buildings or fence of the Artem plant? It would be very interesting to hear what those people involved in the cleanup think happened.

Another possibility that might seem implausible, or simply too appalling to give credence, is that one of the unruly Ukrainian 'self-defence' forces might have fired it from ground level purposefully to provide evidence that Russia is attacking civilians, in the absence of civilian casualties from Russia's strike on the Artem plant. Ukrainian troops who have surrendered have testified that they were ordered to kill civilians, so it's not as outlandish a claim as it sounds. This would be consistent with a less powerful missile fired at a much lower angle, managing to damage only the bottom floors. If one were to really put morality aside and consider what a cynical and amoral actor could do to create the most emotionally compelling story for a Western audience, then an attack resulting in the death of a female RFE journalist, with Russia to blame, would fit the bill almost perfectly.

Note: Based on the CCTV video included in the RFE video, it looks like the impact that hit Hyrych’s apartment happened only moments after the one that hit Artem, so the air defence missile explanation is probably the most likely.

Republished from The Reluctant Dissident.