By Tom Balmforth and Yuliia Dysa
KYIV (Reuters) – Russian forces stationed in the southern border region of Rostov fired the missile that killed Reuters safety adviser Ryan Evans and wounded two of the agency’s journalists when it struck a hotel in eastern Ukraine last month, four Ukrainian security sources said.
Ukraine’s intelligence services, in previously unreported details of the Aug. 24 attack shared with Reuters, said the missile was launched from a site close to Taganrog, a Russian city on the coast of the Sea of Azov near the Ukrainian border.
The intelligence services said there were two Russian units operating close to the launch site at that time: the 1st Guards rocket brigade of the 49th Army and the 107th Guards rocket brigade of the 35th Army.
The Ukrainian military’s general staff, in separate written responses to Reuters’ questions, said that there was also a third unit near Taganrog that could have conducted the strike: the 47th rocket brigade of the 8th Army.
The general staff’s statement said a Russian Iskander 9M723 ballistic missile was fired from the area at around 22:28 (1928 GMT) and struck the Sapphire Hotel in Kramatorsk, where the Reuters team was staying, seven minutes later.
The general staff said the Iskander-M is accurate to within 30 metres of its intended target. However, it said it had no information that Russia had deliberately designated the Sapphire as a priority target nor any intercepts that could shed light on why the hotel was struck.
In a written response to Reuters’ questions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that they were for the armed forces to answer.
“For our part, we can repeat once again – our armed forces strike only at objects directly or indirectly connected with the military infrastructure,” Peskov added.
Russia’s defence ministry did not reply to Reuters’ written questions.
Neither the Ukrainian intelligence services nor the general staff statement explained how they traced the launch site to Taganrog. Nor did they specify which of the brigades was responsible for the attack.
Reuters sent a written request for comment to commanders of the 107th rocket brigade, via an officer serving in the unit, but received no response. The news agency also called a number officially listed for the 1st rocket brigade and was connected to a duty officer, but he ended the call when the reporter introduced herself.
The duty officer who answered the telephone at the 47th brigade headquarters, when asked by Reuters if the unit was involved in the attack on the Sapphire Hotel, said: “That’s impossible”. The officer, who did not give his name, referred further questions to his commander.
The brigade’s commander, Vitaly Bobyr, initially engaged in an exchange of messages with a Reuters reporter on the Telegram messaging platform but, when told about the nature of the inquiry, said it was a wrong number.
DETAILED ANALYSIS
Images of the hotel taken by Reuters correspondents after the attack showed that Evans’ room on the first floor of the northwestern corner of the building bore the brunt of the strike, causing it to collapse into the basement. Six other rooms were badly damaged by the blast, the images showed.
Evans, a 38-year-old former British soldier who had worked as a safety adviser for Reuters since 2022, was killed instantly. Ivan Lyubysh-Kirdey, a videographer for the news agency who was in a room across the corridor, was seriously wounded.
Kyiv-based text correspondent Dan Peleschuk was also injured and was led to safety by rescuers through the dark, debris-strewn kitchen and banquet hall.
The remaining three members of the Reuters team escaped with minor cuts and scratches. Thomas Peter, a Kyiv-based senior photographer, exited through the smashed, first-floor window and climbed down a drainpipe to the ground.
“The whole room was full of rubble and glass and dust,” said Peter. “The wall with the door had completely caved in.”
A leading forensics laboratory in Ukraine, the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise (KSRIFE), which studied images of the missile wreckage taken by the Reuters team in the wake of the attack, concluded it was most likely a Russian Iskander-M.
Two Western military experts, shown the images, also said it was likely an Iskander. Ukraine does not possess these weapons.
Anastasiia Medvedeva, spokeswoman for the Donetsk region prosecutor’s office which is involved in investigating Russian attacks in the province, said their main line of inquiry was whether Russian forces had targeted the hotel. Medvedeva did not specify why the hotel may have been the target.
Prosecutors were also looking at the possibility that Russia had deliberately attacked the group of journalists, she said.
On Aug. 28, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova referred to the attack on the Sapphire in a regular news briefing in Moscow and said, without providing evidence, that Evans was a former employee of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6.
“We know perfectly well that there are no former intelligence officers,” she said. “…Western intelligence services are effectively guiding the media outlets they control to spearhead anti-Russia information campaigns.”
A Reuters spokesperson said the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman’s comments were “factually incorrect”.
“Ryan was not a former MI6 employee. Reuters remains true to its Trust Principles of independence, integrity and freedom from bias, working relentlessly to bring news from the source across all corners of the globe.
“We continue to seek more information about the attack and are supporting our colleagues and their families at this terrible time,” the spokesperson said.
NO MILITARY IN HOTEL
The missile slammed into the hotel at 22:35, three minutes after the Ukrainian air force published an alert on the Telegram messaging app to followers in the eastern part of Ukraine that warned of a ballistic missile threat.
Yuriy Ihnat, a colonel in the air force, which tracks incoming Russian missiles and drones, told Reuters that on the night of the attack, Ukrainian radars detected a single missile in the airspace of Donetsk region, where Kramatorsk is located.
He said the projectile appeared to be a short-range Iskander-M missile launched from Rostov region.
Kramatorsk, which lies some 20 km from the frontline, is comfortably within striking distance for Iskander systems based in Taganrog, some 190 km (120 miles) to the southeast. The missiles have a maximum range of 500 km.
A U.S. official, who declined to be identified, said that Russia was responsible for firing the missile, but he did not elaborate on how the information was obtained, nor provide further details.
According to the Ukrainian general staff, the Ukrainian military had not used the Sapphire Hotel or the buildings around it to house soldiers in the past.
The Reuters team saw no sign of other people staying in the 12-room hotel in the run-up to the strike apart from a watchman.
Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, the hotel operated only for journalists and at the discretion of its management, according to its owner Yuriy Aliyev. Reservations were made by telephone with the administrator, he added.
Several other people, including a Ukrainian soldier, were injured by the strike, according to an initial report by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the country’s main internal security agency, reviewed by Reuters. They included the watchman, a civilian at home nearby and the soldier, who the SBU said was not in the hotel at the time of the strike.
The three told Reuters they did not want to be identified. The soldier said he was walking in the street near the hotel when the missile hit.
Polish journalist Monika Andruszewska was also lightly injured while in a car near the hotel at the time of the attack, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which Reuters confirmed. She wrote on social media that she sustained cuts to her hand.
(Additional reporting by Polina Nikolskaya and Anton Zverev in London, Maria Tsvetkova in New York and Jonathan Landay in Washington; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Daniel Flynn)
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