Ever since Russia’s pro-government Channel 1 inadvertently documented how rebels occupied an apartment building and used it to fire on the Ukrainian army at the Donetsk airport, Russian and Ukrainian bloggers have been trying to locate the building.

At one point in the video after the fighter has shot out the window from an AGS 17, the camera pauses on a panoramic view, where some white cisterns can be seen on the upper right: Bloggers have identified this area to be in the line of sight from this building:

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Translation: It’s behind that very same nine-story “return fire” building on 11 a Vzlyotnaya St. and next door, 12 Govorova St. 12. In the video, the reporter says at 0:46 that “It’s quite likely the return fire will fly in,” so this has become something of a meme on social media. (The word for retaliatory fire in Russia is otvetka.) Here’s the location on Google Maps, which is also in Street View. On the Channel 1 web site, the news story claims that this building was evacuated.

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Translation: “Now the return fire will fly in”. Yet on the Channel 1 site there’s the same video, but the text says “the building is evacuated.” In fact, as we can see at 0:14 on the video, an elderly woman is still living in an apartment in the building. The blogger said this area was used by the fighters for a number of purposes.

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Translation: they have a medical clinic, headquarters and assembly place in this quarter. Another blogger said shooting from Grads was coming from another residential area about 10 kilometers from the airport:

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Translation: now from this area today for the entire day there has been the pounding of Grads and so on. On the earth view of the Google Map it can be seen that this is a wooded area by an old slag heap where the Grads may have been set up. This video uploaded September 27 and labelled “Storm of the airport. Givi unit (Donetsk 27.09.14)” also shows Russian-backed fighters shooting out of an apartment building that also has a close-up view of the cisterns and may be in or near the same building. Givi is the name of a “militia” commander. At 3:30, the fighters pull out a copy of Google Maps themselves and discuss where it would be best to place the artillery. (Warning: graphic scenes.)

At 2:49 a T-72 tank can be seen with a red flag. As we have reported before, these are of the type of tanks only available from Russia and which are not in the Ukrainian arsenal. The rebels may have a kitten as a mascot, and a flag with a religious icon, but they have a skull emblem on the tank, and at the end of the video nonchalantly pass by two corpses, apparently airport technicians killed by shell fire. UPDATE Reporters from Komsomolskaya Pravda filmed from the same apartment building the day before as can be seen from a video uploaded September 30.