Who killed the deputy mayor’s daughter? Tragedy strikes on the beaches of Russian-occupied Crimea

The Uchkuevka beach and park are located on the site of the 17th-century Crimean Tatar village of Uch-Kuyu (“Three Wells”), which was abandoned before the end of the 19th century. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the settlement was briefly revived, becoming home to 37 Russians and one Estonian as per the 1926 census. Then the site was abandoned once again.

Named after a nearby river, the Belbek military airfield was used as an airbase in Soviet times and became famous shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In August 1991, Soviet hardliners disrupted Mikhail Gorbachev’s Crimean vacation by staging an attempted coup d’etat. After the plot failed, the general secretary flew back to Moscow from Belbek. When Crimea became an “autonomous republic” within independent Ukraine, Belbek was partially remodeled as a civilian airfield, bringing in planeloads of tourists from Kyiv and other cities.

In 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea, Belbek again became an exclusively military airfield. Although the occupation authorities expressed their intention to use it as a civilian airport, and even though Moscow allocated almost $35 million for this purpose, the money simply disappeared somewhere, and the civilian airport was never revived. Instead, the site was gradually surrounded by air defense batteries and other military installations, a process that only accelerated after the start of the full-scale war in 2022.

Nevertheless, “tourist infrastructure” sprang up rapidly in Uchkuevka and the neighboring district of Lyubimovka, which is two kilometers from the airfield. In 2019, a fancy park was laid out here, and its local resorts have been actively advertised throughout Russia, with dozens of websites offering package tours. The scope of advertising did not decrease even after 2022, with domestic Russian propaganda still presenting Crimea as an oasis of prosperity — a picture-perfect holiday destination.

The proximity of Uchkuevka and Lyubimovka to a military airfield did nothing to stop the development of tourist infrastructure

Nothing changed even when it became clear that Putin’s blitzkrieg had failed. Ukraine is desperately defending itself, and its drones and missiles have begun to reach Crimea, targeting the Russian planes, missiles, and ships that launch merciless attacks against Dnipro, Odesa, Mykolaiv, and dozens of other Ukrainian cities.

The last widely publicized Ukrainian attack on Belbek was in mid-May, when missiles hit the airfield, damaging several combat aircraft and burning down a fuel and lubricant depot along with several S-400 SAM launchers.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere on Sevastopol’s beaches was aptly summed up in a video blog post shot in Uchkuevka on the eve of the tragedy:

“Everything’s fine here. Everything’s calm. Whenever you turn on the news, you hear about ‘strikes on Sevastopol’ ...No one’s bombing anything here. Everything’s fine. Maybe they’re bombing somewhere, but it’s far from here. And the city itself is great. Everything’s quiet, and people are having a good time. They say it’s bad in Crimea. It’s not bad at all — it’s wonderful in fact! You wouldn’t say it’s a frontline city. There’s really no way to tell. Pretty girls are walking around. Some unattractive ones too...”

This is the place the deputy mayor of Magadan chose as a vacation destination for his family.

The timeline of the tragedy and its coverage in Russia’s propagandist press

On Sunday, vacationers heard “pops” somewhere nearby in the sky and also saw “a cloud of smoke.” At first, no one understood what was happening, as no air alarms were sounded and no warnings or announcements were made. (The Crimean authorities recently decided to cut back on the frequency of air raid alerts to keep tourists at ease.)

Suddenly, a fiery hailstorm spilled onto the beach.

At 11:47 a.m., Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Kremlin-appointed “governor” of Sevastopol, wrote on his Telegram channel that, “a missile attack has been repelled,” with Russian air defense shooting down five Ukrainian missiles, and a reported 14 people injured on the beaches of Uchkuevka and Lyubimovka. As often happens, the scope of the tragedy was not apparent at first: locals saw ambulances rushing towards the seashore, and eyewitness testimonies began to appear on social media replete with photos and videos from showing beachgoers with shrapnel wounds receiving assistance from doctors and other tourists.

At 1:29 p.m., 20 people were reported injured, and Russia’s Ministry of Defense stated that “a terrorist attack was carried out on the civilian infrastructure of the city of Sevastopol with US-supplied ATACMS operational-tactical missiles equipped with cluster warheads,” indicating the time of the attack as 12:15, rather than 11:47 a.m.

In other words, from 1,850 kilometers away, it supposedly took the ministry in Moscow only 74 minutes to determine the type and origins of the missiles fired and to qualify it as a “terrorist attack on civilian infrastructure” — as if Ukrainian forces, after waiting months to receive high-precision, long-range, expensive ATACMS, had deliberately expended them on a beach resort.

Meanwhile, everyone and their mother seemed to spend the rest of the day scouring over satellite images and theorizing as to what actually happened. Even die-hard Russian “patriots” and “war correspondents” pointed out that an ATACMS explosion right over the beach would have caused far more damage, and that the shrapnel in the photos looked more like it came from an S-300 system. Many of those posts, however, were quickly taken down.

After the official announcement that a “U.S. cluster munition missile” had exploded over the beach, the casualty toll began to skyrocket. By late afternoon, official figures stated that “four people died, including two children; 151 people have sought medical attention and 82 were hospitalized.” It was then that the mayor of Magadan announced nine-year-old Sonia Averyanova was among the dead. Her father, the deputy mayor then gave his first interviews about the incident. The grief-stricken official first blamed himself for the girl’s death but soon moved on to cursing Ukraine and America, promising to personally take revenge on all those responsible.

The next day, Sevastopol went into official mourning while Kremlin propagandists rolled up their sleeves and got down to work. The ultimate highlight of the information campaign came when Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in its trademark “diplomatic” style, blamed U.S. Ambassador Lynn Tracy for “yet another bloody crime” committed by Kyiv, which had been “tutored and armed by Washington.” The Russian ministry spoke of “a targeted missile attack on the civilian population of Sevastopol, which resulted in numerous casualties, including children,” insisting that the U.S. “bears equal responsibility with the Kyiv regime for this atrocity.”

On Monday morning, Kremlin propagandists rolled up their sleeves and got down to work

The Americans were “reminded” that targeting and mission inputs for ATACMS missiles “are carried out by U.S. military specialists.” Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova went so far as to call the strike a “ritual crime,” apparently timed by Ukraine’s Jewish president to coincide with an Orthodox Christian holiday.

Sonia Averyanova, whose body lay in a Sevastopol morgue, was used as yet another supposed symbol of Kyiv’s and Washington’s crimes. The girl’s horrible death has become a blessing for Putin’s propaganda — a true stroke of luck.

In most cases, it is a futile endeavor to attempt an investigation based on Telegram posts, photos, and satellite images. And so I will not do it. Instead, I only have one question: what is there in common between the Jun. 23 Sevastopol beach incident, the Jun. 23 shootings in Dagestan, the Mar. 22 terror attack at Crocus City Hall, and the apartment building blown up in Belgorod on May 12? The answer: the total absence of a professional investigation or trial, an illustration of just how conveniently the Putin regime has destroyed Russia’s judicial and law enforcement institutions, turning them into lifeless mummies that broadcast the desires, judgments, and verdicts passed down from the mob boss.

The tragedies in Sevastopol, Dagestan, and Moscow’s Crocus City Hall were never properly investigated

The history of civilization shows that an independent investigation followed by a fair trial is the best — in most cases, the only — way to establish truth in complex situations. When certain evidence is either not collected or is selectively excluded, any conclusions become nothing but conjecture and speculation. And of course, a truly independent investigation is something the Russian government would never allow, as we all saw at the time of the Flight MH17 crash, when Russia went so far as to conjure a false witness, hiring a conman to play the role of a “Spanish air traffic controller” in order to accuse Ukraine of committing a crime that was carried out by Russia itself

Meanwhile, it is common knowledge that Russian propaganda, in the service of the dictator in the Kremlin, lies daily — shamelessly, on a massive scale, and with the use of all available emotional triggers: dead women and children, tragedy, and pain. Notably, the morning after the tragedy in Sevastopol, the narrative about “an ATACMS missile that exploded over the beach, injuring and killing hundreds of civilians” became an accepted truth not only for Russia’s official press, but also for many independent media and international outlets. We have observed a similar pattern in Gaza, with the world press speculating about “Israeli crimes” based on unreputable “reports from the Hamas Ministry of Health.”

Amid the fog, blood, and sudden explosions of war, only one thing is certain: among the victims of the explosion was an innocent girl, Sonia Averyanova, whom her parents had brought from far away to war-torn Crimea for a vacation.

Her father, her killer

Oleg Averyanov was born in 1976 in Krymsk, near Russia’s Black Sea coast, but went to Vladivostok to study in a military academy. After serving in the army for 18 years, in 2011 he went to Magadan to take a job as head of the city’s department of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. Averyanov eventually became deputy mayor of the hundred-thousand-strong city. Even if his academic performance was not stellar there is nothing in the military veteran’s training or career to suggest that he could have been unaware of the risks inherent in bringing his family to a frontline peninsula, regardless of what television commercials may have claimed. And yet, two and a half years into full-scale war, he purchased a package tour and flew his family off to occupied Crimea.

Averyanov, who served in the army for 18 years, could not have been unaware of the risks of bringing his family to a frontline peninsula

Vacations aside, what does the deputy mayor do at work when he isn’t busy saving Magadan from natural disasters? He travels around the Russian Far East, inspecting the morale of newly mobilized troops before their deployment to Ukraine. Media coverage has shown Averyanov visiting a marine brigade preparing to go off and conquer Russia’s embattled neighbor. In April 2024, he offered a farewell speech for conscripts, and the local press is brimming with reports of Averyanov’s activity. Like his colleagues all over Russia, he is busy training, equipping, collecting, and admonishing young people — before sending them to kill and be killed.

How many young men has Averyanov sent to Ukraine? A fairly accurate count of how many have never returned would not be too hard to make, provided we were given access to the necessary documents. The number of Ukrainians killed specifically by his charges is a bit more difficult to calculate, but Averyanov’s complicity in their murders is undeniable. Now that his daughter is dead, he claims to have a “legitimate reason” to incite even more hatred, bringing the thirst for Ukrainian blood to a new level.