DPR Organizes Mass Evacuation Of Russians-In-Ukraine-To-Russia

By Donald Standeford, Correspondent - Follow -
Date Published: February 18, 2022 07:20PM UTC
Last Modified: February 18, 2022 07:20PM UTC

DONETSK - The head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic has announced an agreement with the Russian leadership to evacuate Russian citizens in the Rostov region into Russia. The evacuation is claimed to be carried out due to alleged 'increased shelling by Ukraine' and what they say is an 'impending Ukrainian attack' on Russian separatist locations within Ukraine.

Our intel team has not found evidence of Russia's claims that Ukraine is planning an attack on separatist locations, nor that they have increased artillery fire on the front lines without provocation. We have however seen a drastic increase in separatist attacks and ceasefire violations on locations within Ukraine starting on February 17th which can be viewed in bar and graph charts in our social media groups.

Russian state news TASS says that the evacuations that they are carrying out are due to the danger of Ukraine 'unleashing hostilities' but again, the bar charts that we have obtained show a different story. They in fact show that Russian backed separatists are responsible for the increase in shelling.

If Ukraine did fire back, and we haven't seen evidence to this effect but it's possible that they did; it would likely have been in retaliation for artillery fire from Russian backed separatists who, if we need to remind people are firing on Ukrainian soil and any country would agree... is deserving of a response.

The self-proclaimed head of the DPR Denis Pushilin claimed that "President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky will soon give an order to the military to go on the offensive, to implement a plan to invade the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics".

Pushilin claimed that in recent months the DPR daily "fixes Ukraine’s increase in the number of military personnel and lethal weapons, including Smerch and Uragan multiple launch rocket systems, NLAW rocket kits, as well as Javelins and Stingers along the entire line. contact".

"Today, their guns are aimed at civilians, at us and our children. The enemy's armed forces are in combat formations and are ready to seize Donbass by force" he stated.

Pushilin said that the DPR forces 'having experience in conducting military operations' are in constant combat readiness and are able to 'protect the civilian population and infrastructure'.

Pushilin continued that during the alleged shelling from the Ukrainian side of the 'settlements of the DPR' the life and health of the citizens of the 'republic' may be endangered. "Therefore, from today, February 18, a mass centralized departure of the population to the Russian Federation has been organized. First of all, women, children and the elderly are subject to evacuation".

"The heads of enterprises and institutions need to organize the departure of the families of employees. - to provide transport for the evacuation of the civilian population" Pusilin stated.

He stated that an agreement with the leadership of Russia places for "receiving and accommodating citizens of the republic are ready in the Rostov region. The evacuees will be provided with everything necessary. All conditions have been created at the checkpoints for a quick transition".

Our intel team has acquired many videos put out by Russian state media which allegedly captured the evacuation on video. Our intelligence community noted however that the busses in the videos looked as if the transports in the videos were mostly empty and devoid of people.

Evidence that we have gathered suggest that Russia may be carrying out the evacuation, as well as increased their shelling on Ukrainian positions as part of a plan to stage a situation in which Russia can excuse any military action they may take against Ukraine. This is our assessment based our findings, and lack of evidence supporting Russia's claims toward Ukraine.

Another piece of intel we received was that residents of Donetsk were reportedly sent text messages telling them which border crossing they should take for evacuating into Russia, which according to our findings depended on each person's license plate numbers.

Before the alleged evacuation started, we began receiving reports and videos from all over Donetsk where you could hear air raid sirens going off. Around the same time we also received intel and videos that gas stations were backed up a long ways.

Around the same time these events were taking place there was a report by the DPR that there had been a loud explosion. Some reports stated that it was heard throughout the city. Our intel team found videos released by Russia that showed there was a vehicle explosion.

The self-proclaimed head of the DPR immediately came out with a video 'confirming' the explosion in the center of Donetsk. The vehicle supposedly involved in the explosion looked to be a military vehicle, which Russia later reported to be a UAZ that belonged to Denis Sinenkov (local silovik), Commander of Russian Backed Forces in Donetsk and wasn't in the car during the time of the explosion.

While analyzing the photo that allegedly showed the vehicle after the explosion, our intel team notice that there were very little signs of the vehicle having been in an explosion. Some suggested that the explosion was a 'controlled explosion' with a fast burning explosive such as C4 or TNT. They also noted that it was likely not artillery fire as that would have 'blown it far away'.

On February 17th, an event happened that seemed to 'kick off' the events mentioned above. The internet went out in Ukraine for over an hour, after which our intel team obtained photos showing the lines for Vodafone, the main telecommunications company in the region. One of the lines had a break in it.

At first our intelligence team thought that the line had been cut, but after speaking to a few line specialists we found that they could have also been severed due to careless handling or negligence. We debated on it for a while, with no solid conclusions one way or the other. One one hand it's possible that they were sabotaged, on the other hand it's also possible that it was negligence.

We noted that the timing of the Vodofone internet outage was quite suspicious, but having no solid evidence either way we cannot come to any real conclusion on what really happened.