Good dinner, I wanted to suggest that split. Good to see it done already.

Russia Is Firing Missiles at Ukraine as the U.S. slaps additional sanction is a detailed article from FP.

Just as news broke today that the U.S. Treasury Department was instituting a new suite of sanctions against Russia, video evidence has emerged apparently showing the most definitive proof yet of Moscow's direct participation in the ongoing war in eastern and southern Ukraine: Russian rockets being fired toward Ukraine.

This afternoon, a video was posted to YouTube and shared on social media that claimed to show Grad rockets being fired from a Russian border town likely into Ukraine. Our team at the Interpreter found several other videos with the same descriptions -- Grad rocket launches from Gukovo toward Ukrainian territory.

Several of the videos, filmed near a pond of some sort, were apparently taken by a resident of the town. A careful perusal of Google Street View reveals that several physical features in the videos match exactly a location in the northwest corner of the town, less than two miles from the Ukrainian border.

There has been the Ukrainian claim that Russia shot down an Ukrainina Su-25.

The Boeing crash is the third case of a plane being shot down after Ukrainian military planes, an An-26 transport plane and a Su-25 fighter jet, were brought down from the Russian territory. In particular, at 18:55 on July 16 the Ukrainian Intelligence Service (SBU) reported that Russian Air Force planes were used against an Ukrainian Air Force’s SU-25 plane near the town of Amvrosiyivka. To destroy the target, the command of the Russian Air Force ordered the pilot of a MiG-29 plane to use an R-27T (AA-10 Alamo-B) medium range Infra Red homing air-to-air missile. This type of missile cannot be detected by the Su-25’s SPO-15 radiation warning receiver, and neither can it be detected by satellite surveillance systems or post-launch surveillance systems.

R-27 missiles are manufactured in Ukraine and have the markings of manufacturing company “Artem” (Kyiv), and so if missile debris is found it will not be identifiable as from a Russian weapon. During the air fight, Russian fighter aircraft homed in on the Ukrainian plane three times for a guaranteed rocket launch. After the target was acquired with the help of an onboard quantum optical location station, the MiG-29 fired one missile at the Ukrainian plane. It is only thanks to the skillful anti-missile maneuvers of the Ukrainian pilot that a direct hit was avoided. The missile hit the motor nozzle and the pilot crash-landed the plane.
There is no doubt that in recent weeks Ukrainian forces pushed back seperatist elements and have brought a considerable area with a large population back under state control. There have been considerable casualities among the seperatists and Russia has increased it's supply, especially of heavy weapons. Since air attacks inflicted much of the damage, also on supply convoys coming from the Russian side it is only logically that the Russian-backed speratists wanted to blunt those. Both the delivery of more capable SAMs and the order to Russian jets to shoot an Ukrainian plane make lot of sense in a miltary context. Of course it increased the political risk in a foreign context, but the recent event was clearly not expected. The seemingly narrow decision making in the Kremlin has been already discussed before.