Did U.S.-guided Bombs Kill 21 Russian Students?

Most were teenage girls, and Russia is furious. The response in the West — a big shrug, and media suppression of the news — is making Russians even angrier.

Two weeks ago, a series of repeated Ukrainian drone attacks blasted apart a Russian vocational school’s dormitory and campus. The bombs killed 21 students and injured more than 60 others.

The attacks occurred before 4 a.m. on May 21, killing many students in their sleep. Russian media reported that the surviving students leapt from the windows or ran from the burning building in their pajamas.

The 21 students who died that morning were aged 14 to 18. They had been studying to become elementary school teachers. All but three were young women.

The 18 girls and 3 boys killed by Ukrainian drone strikes on their teachers college, as published across Russian media.

The attack happened in the village of Starobilsk (the Ukrainian spelling) or Starobelsk (the Russian spelling), which is in Luhansk, a Russia-controlled territory that both Ukraine and Russia claim.

Starob*lsk is the red star on the map below.

Maps are often copyrighted, politicized or both. I chose this one because it’s in the public domain: it was displayed last year at a White House event. (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky complained at the time that this map over-stated Russia’s area of control.)

The U.S. ‘Kill Chain’ in Russia

How deep was the U.S. involvement in the killing of these 21 Russian teenagers?

All this spring, Ukrainian drones have been attacking Moscow, St. Petersburg and other points deep inside Russia. It’s little reported in the news here, even though such strikes are often guided by the C.I.A. or other American-led security services, and even though the Kremlin has warned that such strikes could mean America and Russia are directly at war with each other. It’s sort of incredible no one cares about this.

Seven months ago, the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed U.S. officials, reported that America “will provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes … deep inside Russian territory.”

Headline from the Wall Street Journal.

“While the U.S. has long assisted Kyiv’s drone and missile attacks, the intelligence sharing means Ukraine will be better able to hit refineries, pipelines, power stations and other infrastructure far from its borders,” the Journal reported then.

Other infrastructure including Moscow apartment buildings and Donbas teachers colleges?

The report by the Journal followed an earlier investigation last year by The New York Times that asserted America “was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” The Times said American intelligence services “both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”

The Times recounted how an unnamed

European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.

The Russians had long been making such accusations. Nearly two years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted that threats to launch missile or drone attacks deep into Russia — back then, just 20 short months ago, that was still all just crazy talk — would be a sea change in the nature of the war. Putin said this would require the West not just to provide the weapons; and not just to guide them to their target via U.S. / NATO satellites; but to even have U.S. / NATO military personnel select and input the target in the first place.

“The Ukrainian army is not capable of using cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West. They cannot do that. These weapons are impossible to employ without intelligence data from satellites, which Ukraine does not have. This can only be done using the European Union’s satellites, or U.S. satellites — in general, NATO satellites,” Putin said then.

“The second point — perhaps the most important, the key point even — is that only NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this.”

Putin went on to warn that such strikes against Russia — strikes conceived and guided to target in cooperation with American intelligence services — would mean the United States had opted for “direct involvement” in the war, and thus would be “at war with Russia.”

No one came out to contradict this, and of course we went ahead and did it anyway. Today, when the Russians are warning all Westerners to get out of Kyiv before they smash it, the implication is that they are telling U.S. or NATO intelligence officers — the ones presumably in Ukraine to program and guide weapons to their targets — to get out or be killed.

So, again: Were U.S. or NATO intelligence agents part of the “kill chain” last month that took the lives of 21 sleeping Russian teenagers?

We don’t know. It’s possible, even probable, that the teachers college at Starob*lsk was left click, right click, left click’ed into oblivion via some nightmarish Palantir-provided, AI-guided U.S. death tech. Just as likely happened to another school infamously destroyed by mindless U.S. war-making, Iran’s Minab elementary school, vaporized 4 months ago along with more than 100 little kids.

One assumes the teachers college was targeted accidentally. But it’s even possible it was targeted directly, out of some evil plot to rile up the Russians and to provoke them to smash Kyiv — as they have already begun to do, including overnight and into this morning.

Why would Ukraine +/- its C.I.A. handlers intentionally target a bunch of teenagers at a teaching college? Perhaps to breathe new life into a smoldering war in danger of petering out, and to summon American and European voters back into the fight. (Remember, this has never been about helping ordinary Ukrainian people, who have been sacrificed for more than a decade now to the war-making agendas of others.)

That might sound crazy.

But is it? Consider that the odious Ukrainian organization Mirotvorets (Peacemaker), which for years now has winkingly claimed to be affiliated with the C.I.A. and publishes what amount to kill lists, identifies nine top faculty of the Starob*lsk teachers college as traitors to be eliminated. For example, here is the site’s page devoted to Natalya Tsyganok, a “criminal” who is an assistant director of the college:

The text says (in part): “Traitor to the Homeland. Accomplice of the Russian-fascist invaders and terrorists. … [Guilty of] implementation of educational standards, including the chauvinistic ideologies of the aggressor state, at educational institutions in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Dissemination of Russian propaganda among minors. Psychological abuse, moral corruption, and the fascist indoctrination of Ukrainian children.”

I learned that from reading Russia’s top business newspaper, Vedomosti, a newspaper I long ago helped launch (as a three-way joint venture between the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and The Moscow Times, which I then edited).

The banner atop the Mirotvorets webpage lists itself as headquartered in Langley, Virginia, a barely-veiled claim that it is C.I.A.-endorsed.

C.I.A. has never disavowed Mirotvorets — even though this weird organization has published lists of enemies to be eliminated that included American journalists and scholars, and then has gleefully crossed off in red those critics who end up “liquidated” (murdered).

So, in a world spinning out of control, we have a self-proclaimed Ukrainian-C.I.A. joint venture that publishes kill lists highlight the faculty of an obscure teachers college — which then gets blown to hell, so that 14- and 15-year-old girls die in terror in their beds — which then becomes the official (yet rarely mentioned here) justification for angry Russians to escalate dramatically this morning and to rain death down on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, smashing apartment blocks, killing 13 so far, burying innocents (including some children) in the rubble …

To be continued, unfortunately.