During the night from Friday to Saturday, the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was the target of a “double strike” by Russian missiles which left seven people dead. In mid-March, the same type of attack was carried out on Odessa with a much heavier toll of 20 dead and 73 injured. In the latter case, a ballistic missile fell around 10 a.m. on a residential area of Odessa, causing panic and the dispatch of numerous emergency services to the site. Fifteen minutes after the first strike, a second missile fell in the same location, killing or injuring firefighters and paramedics. Burr? No, because that’s exactly the principle of “double strike”.
Odessa, Nikolaev, Kherson, Kharkiv. These four Ukrainian cities were the proven targets of Russian “double tap” missile airstrikes. A tactic different from so-called “conventional” bombings whose aim is as simple as it is vicious: target an objective the first time, give time for emergency services, soldiers or journalists to arrive on site then launch another missile at the same place to maximize the number of casualties. Reporting in Kharkiv with a team of ambulances, journalists from the American channel CNN were able to film an attack of this type on April 17, 2022.
A technique popular with terrorists
“The double strike is almost a rule for bomb attacks,” assures 20 minutes Alain Rodier, research director at the French Intelligence Research Center and contributor to the journal Raids. “We can almost say that it was the terrorists who invented it,” he adds. The latest example, among many others, is the attack perpetrated by Daesh in Iran during the ceremony in tribute to General Soleimani. “Two bombs exploded in the same area ten minutes apart. The goal was clearly to cause as many victims as possible,” assures the specialist. Moreover, it was the second explosion, which occurred in the midst of panic, which caused the most deaths.
Quite logically, international conventions denounce this type of practice, sometimes described as war crimes. “Double striking is not directly mentioned in the conventions, but rather what is behind it,” explains to 20 minutes Colonel Michel-William Drapeau, former Canadian army soldier and specialist in military law. “What can be qualified as a war crime is the desire to directly and deliberately affect civilian lives by carrying out such strikes,” he continues.
However, the most difficult thing is to prove the intention, even if, for the ex-colonel, “current targeting systems leave little room for error when seeking to destroy an objective”. This investigative work is that of experts from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Contacted about this by 20 minutesthe ICC Prosecutor’s Office ensures that it works “in close collaboration on the ground with survivors, affected communities and Ukrainian authorities to collect evidence in order to build solid cases concerning alleged international crimes committed in Ukraine”.
Nearly 60 “double strikes” proven in Syria
Moreover, the ICC issued two arrest warrants against two Russian soldiers, the head of the air force and the head of the navy, suspected of having directed deliberate missile attacks against civilians. However, out of concern for “confidentiality of investigations”, the ICC does not mention the particular case of possible “double strikes”. However, everyone knows that it exists: “the use of this technique is so well known that the emergency services are even theoretically trained to take this risk into account in their intervention protocols,” specifies Alain Rodier.
War in Ukraine
The Syrian Justice and Accountability Center (SJAC) issued a damning report on the “double strikes” carried out by the Russian air force and the Syrian army in Syria. According to this report, no less than 58 strikes of this type were recorded between 2013 and 2021, all in “residential sectors”. The report states that “the vast majority of victims were civilians, including women and children, as well as first responders who assisted victims after the initial strike.”