Ukrainian bunker full of NATO officers destroyed – silence in the West

Im März zerstörten angeblich zwei Kinzhal Raketen unweit der westukrainischen Stadt Lwow einen der sichersten Bunker in der Ukraine voller hoher NATO-Offiziere. Was ist die Kinzhal-Rakete und warum schweigt der Westen?

René Zittlau

Introduction

The Greek news portal Pronews published on March 9, 2023 that a Russian Kinzhal supersonic missile with a hit speed of 12 Mach (twelve times the speed of sound) destroyed the joint Ukrainian-NATO command, control and communications center near Lvov at a depth of 130 meters, killing about 300 officers from Ukraine, England, USA. 

Newsweek, for instance, concludes that this is Fake News. The author, however, believes that the report is true. Nevertheless, it is war and everything is possible.

Facts

A bunker near Lviv

About 120 meters underground, the Soviet Union built a command and control bunker near the Ukrainian-Polish border at Lvov, which was supposed to survive a direct nuclear strike. Since then, it has been modernized by Ukraine and – to ensure that nothing really happens – it is also protected all around by NATO air defense systems. 

The best was just good enough to protect this bunker; according to Russian sources the German IRIS-R system and the American NASAMS system.

Thus upgraded, this bunker was deemed good by both the Ukrainian army and its mentor, NATO, to conduct strategic planning for the Ukrainian army from there. 

The location close to Poland will most certainly have played a role in this as well. And so senior personnel from various countries felt safe there. Not only Ukrainian, no also plenty of NATO generals and officers.

It is a truism that with today’s technical reconnaissance capabilities it is very difficult to really hide anything. Especially when, like Ukraine, you are facing an adversary who built this facility himself and is thus well aware of its value. 

The NATO officers felt so secure that they parked their vehicles in front of the bunker – a perfect target for Russian reconnaissance.

Kinzhal

The missile “KH-47M2 Kinzhal” (English: Dagger), unveiled by President Putin in March 2018, has already been used a few times in the Ukraine conflict, including on March 9. Kinzhal has a range of 2,000 km and reaches a speed of Mach 10 to Mach 12. 

This makes it a so-called hypersonic missile. Supersonic is the term for speeds from Mach 1 to Mach 5, above that it is hypersonic. 

Against a missile flying at Mach 10 to 12, Western air defense systems simply do not work. 

Furthermore, the missile’s hit accuracy is said to be one meter. 

The missile has a warhead of 500 kg. This is a lot, but there are significantly larger so-called bunker buster bombs. 

The “secret” why the Kinzhal could nevertheless destroy a bunker at a depth of over 100 meters, which was considered indestructible, is due to the high speed of the Kinzhal, since kinetic energies are released upon impact, which were previously considered impossible.

The conspicuous silence

On the night of March 9, 2023, the last major missile attack by the Russian army on militarily important targets in Ukraine took place. On that day, the major media in the West wrote all sorts of things about it: Power failure at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant and the restoration of the same. One could read that Russia was supposed to have attacked residential buildings in Zaporozhye with anti-aircraft missiles and other things. 

However, one could not find even the slightest hint of a bunker or even its destruction. However, there was already chatter in the vastness of the Internet. 

The only official description by the Russian army sounded like this:

“The Russian Defense Ministry said that Russian forces carried out an attack on military targets in Ukraine in response to terrorist attacks in the Bryansk region using Kinzhal missiles and “all intended targets were hit.” 

Then, at the end of March, the story picked up again. Both analysts in the West and sources in the East took up the incident again. One of them, Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based multilingual analyst, refers to official Russian sources.

These showed that on March 9, two Kinzhal missiles destroyed a command bunker not far from Lvov. About 300 people were killed, including about 200 NATO generals and officers. The USA, Great Britain and Poland were named as the countries of origin. The Komsomolskaya Pravda, published in Moscow, serves as the source.

This, too, was not echoed in the media of the West and probably will not be in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, we can assume that the reports about the destruction of this bunker are true.  

For one thing, the descriptions are detailed as to how the bunker was destroyed. It is described that the air defenses around the bunker were completely destroyed. Also detailed was how the bunker itself was attacked: First, a Kinzhal missile drilled several dozen meters into the ground and the upper bunker cover before detonating. This was followed by the second Kinzhal missile – into exactly the same shaft. The technical prowess that made this feat possible may in itself be another reason for Ukraine’s and NATO’s conspicuous silence about the incident. 

The fact that the Ukrainian army and NATO do not explain, or even admit, the loss of this command bunker, which was practically turned into a fortress, is in line with the prevailing official narrative. This narrative still practically denies Russia such capabilities.  

Furthermore, Western weapons are repeatedly sold as game changers, especially the IRIS and NASAMS air defense systems. Reports of their destruction would be neither politically nor militarily beneficial. Moreover, they would reinforce the opinion of those who are shouting ever louder: Enough is enough! Let’s talk to each other and find a viable solution that will end this madness!

There is a lot of evidence – the event is real

There are very clear indications that the loss of the bunker in Ukraine is real. For this I refer once again to the official Russian report quoted above. As dryly worded as it was, it reveals two key points for those who know how to interpret this style: 

“Kinzhal” and “response to terrorist attacks in Bryansk region.” 

Kinzhal missiles have been repeatedly described as a means of attacking “centers of decision-making.” They are expensive and their use is therefore well-considered. But: their target deviation of maximum one meter and their other technical parameters guarantee the destruction of the intended target. Their kinetic energy is enormous. 

The reader may try to imagine what happens when a missile with a mass of 500 kg hits its target at its maximum speed of almost 15,000 km/h. The missile’s kinetic energy is very high. These 500 kg refer only to the weight of the warhead. To this must be added the kinetic energy of the mass of the residual missile and the destructive force of the explosive. 

The other reference, hardly mentioned so far, is hidden in “Response to terrorist attacks in the Bryansk region”:

Although I do not have reliable statistics, it is nevertheless striking that since March 9 there have been hardly any reports of attacks on Bryansk or Kursk on the part of Ukraine.