The Sept. 6 missile strike on Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine was one of the deadliest in the country in months, killing at least 15 civilians and injuring more than 30 others. The weapon’s payload of metal fragments struck a market, piercing windows and walls and wounding some victims beyond recognition.

Less than two hours later, President Volodymyr Zelensky blamed Russian “terrorists” for the attack, and many media outlets followed suit.

But evidence collected and analyzed by The New York Times, including missile fragments, satellite imagery, witness accounts and social media posts, strongly suggests the catastrophic strike was the result of an errant Ukrainian air defense missile fired by a Buk launch system.

Ukrainian authorities initially tried to prevent journalists with The Times from accessing the missile debris and impact area in the strike’s immediate aftermath. But the reporters were eventually able to get to the scene, interview witnesses and collect remnants of the weapon used.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/843485

The Chinese spy balloon that was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean in early February was built -- at least partly -- using American off-the-shelf parts, a U.S. official has confirmed to ABC News.

A second U.S. official was also able to confirm that the balloon did not appear to have transmitted any of the data it collected on its journey above North America, as was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The first official could not say whether any of the American gear was sold illicitly to China but said determining whether any of it came from illegal trade was a topic of serious concern among officials since some items -- like chips -- are forbidden to sell to certain markets.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/835983

On Friday evening, the Biden administration published a previously classified intelligence report acknowledging that three years of investigations have produced no evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was created in a laboratory by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

This admission demolishes years of false claims, uncritically promoted by the entire spectrum of the US media and political establishment, that China deliberately created the virus that has infected the world and killed more than 20 million people.

The report reveals that three leading US newspapers the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal lied when they claimed that the United States had evidence that researchers at the institute were hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms before the start of the pandemic, and were thus the proverbial “patient zero.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/735085

Czech President Petr Pavel says Russian citizens living abroad should be put under “strict surveillance” by intelligence services in their host countries.

“All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war,” Pavel said in an interview with Radio Free Europe released Thursday.