Key Points
- Russia says 63 of its servicemen were killed in the strike on Makiivka, but Ukraine says the death toll is in the hundreds.
- The rare announcement drew condemnation from Russian military bloggers, who say the high number of soldiers shouldn't ave been housed near an ammunition dump.
- Ukraine says it has shot down all 39 drones launched by Russia overnight.
Russia acknowledged on Monday that scores of its troops were killed in one of the Ukraine war's deadliest strikes, drawing demands from nationalist bloggers for commanders to be punished for housing soldiers alongside an ammunition dump.
Russia's defence ministry said 63 soldiers had died in the fiery blast which destroyed a temporary barracks in a former vocational college in Makiivka, twin city of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk.
It said the accommodation had been hit by four rockets fired from US-made HIMARS launchers, claiming two rockets had been shot down. Kyiv said the Russian death toll was in the hundreds, though pro-Russian officials called this an exaggeration.
A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) moves at the northern Kherson region, October 2022. Source: AAP / Hannibal Hanschke
Separately, Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down all 39 drones Russia had launched in an unprecedented third straight night of air strikes against civilian targets in Kyiv and other cities.
Ukrainian officials said their success proved that Russia's tactic in recent months of raining down air strikes to knock out Ukraine's energy infrastructure was increasingly a failure as Kyiv beefs up its air defences.
Unverified footage posted online of the aftermath of the Makiivka strike on the Russian barracks showed a huge building reduced to smoking rubble.
Igor Girkin, a former commander of pro-Russian troops in east Ukraine who has emerged as one of the highest profile Russian nationalist military bloggers, said the death toll was in the hundreds, later editing his post to include wounded in that figure. Ammunition had been stored at the site and Russian military equipment there was uncamouflaged, he said.
Another nationalist blogger, Rybar, said around 70 soldiers were confirmed dead and more than 100 wounded.
"What happened in Makiivka is horrible," wrote Archangel Spetznaz Z, another Russian military blogger with more than 700,000 followers on Telegram.
"Who came up with the idea to place personnel in large numbers in one building, where even a fool understands that even if they hit with artillery, there will be many wounded or dead?" he wrote. Commanders "couldn't care less" about ammunition stored in disarray on the battlefield, he said.
"Each mistake has a name."
Russia's acknowledgement of scores of deaths in one incident was almost without precedent. Moscow rarely releases figures for its casualties, and when it does the figures are typically low - it acknowledged just one death from among a crew of hundreds when Ukraine sank its flagship cruiser Moskva in April.
Russia has seen in the new year with nightly attacks on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, hundreds of kilometres from the front lines. The nightly attacks mark a change in tactics, after months in which Moscow usually spaced such strikes around a week apart.
Kyiv said the new tactic was a sign of Russia's desperation as Ukraine's ability to defend its air space had improved.
"Now they are looking for routes and attempts to hit us somehow, but their terror tactics will not work. Our sky will turn into a shield," presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak said on Telegram.
In his latest nightly speech, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised Ukrainians for showing gratitude to the troops and one another and said Russia's efforts would prove useless.
Anatolii Kaharlytskyi, 73, stands near his house after a Russian attack in Kyiv on 2 January, 2023. Kaharlytskyi was injured and his daughter Iryna died in the attack. Source: AAP / Renata Brito
Russia has turned to mass air strikes against Ukrainian cities since suffering humiliating defeats on the battlefield in the second half of 2022.
It says its attacks, which have knocked out heat and power to millions in winter, aim to reduce Kyiv's ability to fight. Ukraine says the attacks have no military purpose and are intended to hurt civilians, a war crime.
