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“So they’re really going with the theory that Russia shelled a prison on DPR territory to kill Azov militants whom they could have just as easily publicly hanged to the thunderous applause of virtually everyone in Russia and part of Ukraine.”

See, this is what is known as “confirmation bias” - when people avoid the hardship of looking for a range of plausible scenarios, because the first one that gets thrown at them looks good enough - so they then only look at the evidence for the theory they’ve decided to go with.

The “Ukes did it” narrative has a few holes in it. So does the “Russia did it” narrative.

So, what else do we know? Objective facts, not propaganda.

Here’s a sample.

1. Russia has THIS YEAR officially renewed its “no death penalty” policy - during the war. So the “hang ‘em” idea is for the birds. Russia is far more likely to throw them in a Siberian gulag than give them a fair public trial and then send them to the gallows for a Sharia style public execution.

2. The DPR has capital punishment. It imposed that purely so it could execute alleged Azov fighters after conducting closed room tribunals. It doesn’t want to make a show of these executions, and it doesn’t want a long term problem of keeping them in prison either.

3. There’s another “even though” that you might not have thought of... The DPR has just done a prisoner swap with Ukraine, giving a whole bunch of Azov fighters their freedom. And Russia certainly doesn’t want to do that after making a huge song and dance about how it wants to hold tribunals but doesn’t want to reinstate the death penalty...

So, if you put (2) and (3) together you get an interesting equation: Russia would rather these prisoners weren’t where they were, and if it were up to the DPR they’d either be executed or swapped or shipped into Russia - anything that can offload the problem.

“Even though Ukraine hasn’t exactly shied away from launching artillery strikes against DPR territory in recent weeks.”

I don’t think anyone’s saying that a Uke strike on the prison is implausible. The question is, how much more plausible is it than the alternative?

One way to avoid any problems related to negotiations of a prisoner swap is, if the prisoners you could swap are definitely all dead and you can say “it wasn’t our fault”.

So yes, the Ukes could’ve done it, but just like I don’t think Russia’s “friendly fire” shooting down of its own chopper was intended to benefit Ukraine, I can’t see why Ukraine would deliberately do something to benefit Russia.

And one has to wonder, if Russia didn’t want to risk those guys getting swapped, how would Russia kill them all very quickly and maintain plausible deniability...?

I imagine it’s not difficult to give some of the personnel an excuse to be away from the prisoner accommodation just before bombing the crap out of it.