An analysis of satellite images, conducted by CNN in cooperation with the Center for Information Resilience (CIR), revealed that Russian Colonel Alexander Zuravliov, accused of committing crimes in Syria, launched a cluster bomb attack on Ukrainian civilians in the city of Kharkiv.
The American channel tracked details regarding 11 “Smerch” missiles, which fell in Kharkiv on February 27 and February 28, and found that they were launched from the 79th Missile Artillery Brigade stationed in the Russian Belgorod region, led by Zhuravliov.
For survivors of the years-long Syrian civil war, the scenes in Kharkiv resemble the crimes that Moscow committed in their country following it intervened to aid the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in 2015.
The channel indicated that Zhuravlev, 57, was sent to Syria 3 times, and became commander of the Russian forces there in July 2016.
Having taken over, the Russian army quickly escalated its attacks on opposition-held territory, besieging the city of Aleppo, killing and starving a large number of civilians.
His leadership also saw a significant increase in documented cluster munition attacks in Aleppo. According to the Violations Documentation Center, which documents human rights violations in Syria, cluster munitions were used 137 times in Aleppo between September 10 and October 10 2016, an increase of 791 percent over the average number of cluster munition attacks during the previous eight months.
In 2015, the Russian Defense Ministry denied using cluster munitions in Syria. But the director of Save the Children in Syria at the time, Sonia Koch, said in a statement: “There are young children who have recently had their limbs amputated, or who have balls attached to their muscle tissue due to the use of these horrific and indiscriminate weapons.”
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, CNN spoke to dozens of eyewitnesses in several neighborhoods targeted by Russian Smerch missiles on February 27 and 28. They pointed to the death and destruction that these cluster munitions had wrought on their city.
According to the Ukrainians, the streets of the city were filled with wounded, burned cars and broken glass. One eyewitness said that up to ten people were wounded in his apartment building alone in a single missile attack from Smerch.
“I don’t know exactly what this was, but it was all over the region,” added Yuri Priko, an IT software analyst who lives in Kharkiv. Those little bits that explode and send dangerous shrapnel everywhere. You reach different places, windows, and people.”
The remnants of the missiles, which were spotted in Kharkiv, and the burn marks left by the projectiles, revealed the direction of the attack, which goes back to the Russian Belgorod region, near the border with Ukraine.
Mark Hiznay, a weapons expert and associate arms director for Human Rights Watch, said the images indicate that cluster munition attacks have occurred on a scale not seen in years.
“It’s not like the movies where you watch the rocket before the bomb goes down,” Hiznay added. The missiles suddenly explode into 72 small parts. That’s why people are literally cut in the ways with these things. You don’t have many burns. You do not have blast injuries. They are just bloody fragments (..).”
the injuries themselves
Cluster bombs are banned under a 2010 international treaty that bans the use, transfer, production and stockpiling of weapons.
The treaty notes that many submunitions fail to explode on impact, but they leave dangerous munitions in fields and urban areas, which can kill or maim people.
Experts confirmed that the attacks in Kharkiv on February 27 and 28 amount to war crimes.
“Extrajudicial killings and the bombing of civilian populations, not a military necessity and disproportionate to the threat they face, are inconsistent with the Geneva Conventions,” said Foreign Policy Research Institute Fellow Philip Wasilevsky.
CNN contacted the Kremlin for comment, but there was no response.
After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the Syrian-American orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Samer Attar, who worked in Aleppo during the siege of the city by General Zhuravlev’s forces, traveled to Ukraine to help doctors treat the wounded.
Al-Attar described the injuries he treated in Kharkiv and those he saw in Aleppo in 2016 as “the same.”
With the end of the Battle of Aleppo, Zhuravliov left command of the Russian army in Syria and returned to Moscow. He received the highest honors given to a Russian officer, and was promoted twice the following year to become commander of the Western Military District, the same division that launched the devastating attacks on Kharkiv and other parts of Ukraine.
“The results that Zuravliov achieved in Syria were exactly what the Russians wanted, hence his reward with the highest medal and the highest positions one can obtain,” said the Russian military expert Wasilievsky.
“Colonel Alexander Zuravliov should have been punished for his actions in Syria,” said Matthew Ingham, a prominent human rights attorney at the law firm of Payne Hicks Beach. It is a shame that there was no stronger response to the alleged war crimes at that point, as it may have affected Putin’s strategic calculations in Ukraine from the start.”
