Quoting The Telegraph,

Two US officials said on Tuesday night they had intelligence confirming that two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the aid convoy at the precise time it was struck, and that the conclusion was that Russia was to blame.

 It’s worth quoting RT, because, as a state channel, their explanation is the Russian exculpation:

The Russian Center for Reconciliation said that it had used drones to accompany the convoy because its route passed through territory controlled by the rebels, but only to a certain point…“Russian and Syrian warplanes did not carry out any airstrikes on a UN humanitarian aid convoy in the southwest of Aleppo,”  Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement Tuesday….“Around 13:40 Moscow time (10:40 GMT) the aid convoy successfully reached the destination. The Russian side did not monitor the convoy after this and its movements were only known by the militants who were in control of the area,” Konashenkov added…The Defense Ministry spokesman said that the Russian military had been looking at video footage…“We have closely studied the video footage from where the incident took place and we did not find any signs of any ammunition having hit the convoy. There are no craters, while the vehicles have their chassis intact and they have not been severely damaged, which would have been the case from an airstrike,” Konashenkov said.

Several refutations are immediate:

•  Unlike gravity bombs, rockets that strike trucks do not generally leave craters, unless the trucks themselves contain munitions that result in large secondary explosions.
• The damage is not compatible with a heavy high-explosive warhead, one of the three choices for the KH-23 ground attack missile.  But it is compatible with another choice, a fragmentation warhead, which is the logical loadout for attack of unprotected positions, providing greater area coverage.
• A relatively new tool, Google Search, is a remarkably useful tool for assessment of psychological perspectives. The search term is “Russians take responsibility for tragedy.” See what you come up with, from any time period.

But was it intentional, an act of revenge for   the mistaken U.S. bombing of Assad’s army? One additional detail of the Russian excuse is noteworthy, the Russian claim that the convoy was escorted by terrorists. Reuters reports , and quoting The Telegraph,

Russia’s defence ministry released drone footage late on Tuesday that it says showed a pickup truck carrying militants and hauling a heavy mortar driving alongside the convoy before it was bombed…In a statement posted on its Facebook page last night, the Russian defence ministry said the drone footage cast “new details on the incident.”…”It is clearly visible how terrorists deploy a pickup with a large calibre mortar alongside the convoy,” the ministry said. 

So what do we do with denials that smack of  O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It, resonating with the street classic, “I didn’t do it, but if I did, I was drunk”? Perhaps counter-intuitively, open source analysis requires developing the argument of the adversary. If you want to get fancy about it, we could quote Hegel ‘s thesis, antithesis, synthesis. By this process, we at least partially free ourselves from our personal biases.

The conclusion that the act  was intentional from the highest level weakens a little with the extended playout of Russian excuses. Typical Russian propaganda, prepared ahead of time, doesn’t pay much attention to temporal plausibility. It is also weakened by characteristics of  the Russian military about which the popular media is not very informative.

Of all the subjects covered in the popular press, military reporting is  the weakest, and unintentionally deceptive. For politicians as well as journalists, weapons systems are a kind of toy store, as well as  jobs programs for the elves that make them. Consequently, most of the world’s militaries are “hollow”, meaning that they are incapable of actualizing the incredible specifications their weapons systems are alleged to have.

Modern warfare is not composed of isolated weapons systems. They are complex syntheses of man and machine, not simply at the tip of the spear, as in the cockpit, but encompassing logistics, communications, and decision making that forms a kind of inverted pyramid. The pyramid is broad, heavy, and substantial, narrowing to the tiny needle of the warplane the carries out the attack.

The beginning of the modern pyramid dates back to 1937, in the U.K., in the design of air defense control that ultimately lead to victory in the Battle of Britain. Development in the West of operations research (OR), has been continual since that time.  The vast technological and procedural knowledge is continually augmented and passed on in our war colleges, which are nothing like the blog-fests of the major news sites. It is a serious, highly intellectual affair that eludes casual interest.

For the Russians, this is very new. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, the advanced concepts of the West could not even be considered because Soviet doctrine was one of central control of relatively simple elements that were not expected to exhibit intelligent, initiative-born behavior. In lieu of modern, almost instantaneous command pyramid communication and control, the Russians relied on simple “standing orders.” Since that time, the Russians have embarked on drastic modernization, not simply of military hardware, but of the doctrines that run the whole enterprise. They haven’t had a lot of practice.

The video of drone footage provided by the Russian and exhibited by The Telegraph shows what the Russians call a “large caliber mortar”, towed alongside the stopped convoy. It cannot excuse the subsequent attack. But given the level of ability of Russian command-and-control, it may explain. The far better U.S. command-and-control system did not prevent the U.S. accidental bombing. Quoting CNN,

That’s a working theory of how US, British, Danish and Australian aircraft may have incorrectly assessed intelligence and targeted the site that killed more than 60 Syrian personnel near Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria. The UK Ministry of Defence is saying it used drones in the strike.

And U.S. command-and-control, intelligence gathering, analysis, and decision has been honed to perfect pitch since the 1991 Gulf War.

The open source conclusion is that this was a Russian command-and-control misfire, approved at a level incompetent to make the decision.

Few are the countries strong enough to admit mistakes. Russia is not one of them. What remains to be seen is their sensitivity to human suffering.