Unmasked: The Russian missile brigade slaughtering Ukrainian civilians

Should Russia ever face a war crimes court over its actions in Ukraine, the men of the 112th missile brigade may have some explaining to do.

Officially, their job is to support Russian troops in north-east Ukraine, using huge, truck-launched rockets to take out military targets far behind enemy lines.

Unofficially, they are also accused of “terror bombing”, such as this weekend’s Palm Sunday attack on the city of Sumy, which killed 34 people.

Just before 10.30am, an Iskander ballistic missile – a 21-foot projectile big enough to carry a nuclear warhead – slammed into Sumy’s down town area, packed with worshippers returning from church. Minutes later, in a so-called “double tap”, a second Iskander scattered cluster munitions as rescue workers rushed to help.

The Kremlin has insisted that the attack – denounced as a war crime by European leaders – was aimed at a gathering of senior military officers.

But Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, has pinned the blame on the 112th missile brigade – a unit Kyiv says specifically targets civilians. Kyiv also blames the 448th brigade for the Sumy attack and on Tuesday targeted its base in a retaliatory strike.

In October 2023, the 112th was accused of firing an Iskander at a funeral in the village of Hroza, killing 59 mourners. Another attack, last July, destroyed a demining office in Kharkiv.

Mr Budanov has sworn vengeance against the 112th, vowing that “no war criminal – from those who gave orders to those who launched the missiles – escapes retribution”. Coming from Ukraine’s spymaster, that is no idle threat.

Last summer, his agents published a dossier on 30 Russian soldiers allegedly working for the 112th, including names, photos, rank and passport details.

In January, Konstantin Nagayko, a 112th captain, was badly injured after opening a parcel bomb, widely understood to have delivered in retribution for the Hroza attack. He was helicoptered to hospital, but died later from massive head wounds.

“Russian surgery was of no help to the war criminal,” said Mr Budanov’s office afterwards. “The Ukrainian people will see just retribution for every war crime committed against them.”

Based in Shuya, north-east of Moscow, the 112th is part of the 1st Tank Army of the Moscow Military District, and received its Iskander missile batteries in 2014 as part of Vladimir Putin’s modernisation of the Russian armed forces. It has three missile divisions, with 12 operational launchers.

According to the Ukrainian intelligence dossier on the brigade, its commander is Sergey Sergeevich Ponomarev, 47. The deputy commanders are Vladimir Alexandrovich Filin, 48, and Nikolay Vladimirovich Izvoltsev, 50.

Other senior commanders, according to the dossier, include Alexander Vladimirovich Sukhorukov, Vyacheslav Yurievich Osokin, Roman Anatolyevich Ivshyn, Sergey Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov and Vladimir Igorevich Yudin.

The Kremlin denies using Iskanders to target civilians, claiming that Ukrainian troops routinely use civilian buildings to hold operational meetings. Over the weekend, Russian state television portrayed the Sumy attack as a “fabrication”, saying it was intended to sabotage ceasefire talks between Moscow and Washington.

What is not in doubt, however, is the horrifying power of such missiles, which carry a payload many times that of the average mortar or artillery shell. An Iskander can deliver nearly a tonne of high-explosive from up to 350 miles away, precision guided to within ten or 20 metres of a target. Fired into a typical civilian neighbourhood, its warhead – designed to destroy factories, take out bridges or hardened bunkers – can devastate an entire street.

First used in combat during Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, the missile is typically launched off a 40-tonne articulated truck, equipped with tractor-sized wheels that allow it to operate off-road. It then climbs up to 30 miles into the sky before plummeting at up to six times the speed of sound, making it hard for air defences to intercept.

The missiles typically cost several million dollars each – far more than a mortar or artillery round – but thanks to their range can be used to hit targets well beyond the immediate front-line areas. Their computerised command facilities can receive targeting information from other Russian units, and also real-time battlefield video from drones.

Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said it was unlikely that some of those who had launched the missile that hit Sumy would have been ignorant as to what the target was.

“The individuals who were pulling the trigger, so to speak, probably would have been given essentially co-ordinates to plug into the onboard computers, rather than necessarily deep detail of what they were firing,” he said.

“But even if you assume that the decisions were made at a higher level...the commanders of the brigade would have probably been given a set of targets...so they would have a certain degree of knowledge.”

Iskanders have also been used throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and have been blamed for some of the war’s most notorious acts of civilian slaughter.

Earlier this month, Kyiv said that one had been used in an attack on president Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city of Kryvyi Rih, which killed 19 people. Nine children were among those killed in the blast, which sprayed shrapnel across a playground.

Another Iskander was blamed for an attack on the Ria Pizza restaurant in the Donbas city of Kramatorsk in June 2023, which killed 15 people, including the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who also worked for Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian human rights organisation exposing Russian war crimes.

Whether Russian missile commanders ever agonise over their targeting decisions is another matter. Glen Grant, a former British military attache to the Baltics and a former advisor to Ukraine’s defence ministry, said he doubted it.

“My sense is that throughout the Russian military system, there’s a near-100 per cent consensus about destroying Ukraine. They are not going to say: ‘Oh, this is a hospital, or this is a civilian facility, we mustn’t fire’. These guys don’t care.”

While it currently seems unlikely that Russia will ever hand over war crimes suspects for trial, those who pressed the button on such attacks from afar can no longer presume they will never be identified.

Thanks to open-source satellite imaging, human rights investigators are now often able to track the likely trajectories of missile launches back to specific Russian units.

In the case of the Ria Pizza restaurant missile attack, Amelina’s former colleagues at Truth Hounds produced an 80-page investigation, titled The Bill is on You. It identified the culprits as Russia’s 47th missile brigade, under the command of Colonel Vitaliy Bobyr.

Col Bobyr has since also been accused by Ukrainian intelligence of involvement in a missile attack in Kramatorsk last August that killed Ryan Evans, a British security advisor working with a team of Reuters journalists. Again, the target in the attack was not a military installation, but a hotel.