Moscow:
Russian nationalists and some lawmakers have demanded punishment for commanders accused of ignoring threats as anger grew over the killing of dozens of Russian soldiers in one of the war’s deadliest attacks in Ukraine.
In a rare revelation, Russia’s defense ministry said 63 soldiers died on New Year’s Eve in a fiery blast that destroyed a temporary barracks at a vocational school in Makiivka, sister city of eastern Ukraine’s Russian-occupied regional capital Donetsk.
Ukraine and some Russian nationalist bloggers have put the toll much higher, in the hundreds, though pro-Russian officials say such estimates are exaggerated.
Russian critics said the soldiers were housed next to an ammunition depot at the site, which the Russian Defense Ministry said was hit by four missiles fired from US-made HIMARS launchers.
The attack on Makiivka came as Russia launched what has become nightly waves of drone strikes on Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.
Ukrainian officials said Russia hit Ukrainian-controlled parts of the Donetsk region on Monday, hitting the village of Yakovlivka and the town of Kramatorsk and destroying an ice rink in the town of Druzhkivka.
‘PARITY’ OF ARMS
The governor of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, which together with neighboring Donetsk make up Moscow-claimed industrial Donbas, said on Tuesday Ukrainian forces had made steady advances toward Russian-held Svatove and Kreminna.
“(Russian armed forces) are used to having a full advantage in both artillery and shells. Now we have reached parity and our artillerymen are shooting better, hitting more ammunition depots and barracks, while firing far fewer shots,” Governor Serhiy Haidai told the Ukrainian television.
Elsewhere, Ukraine’s military general staff said a Dec. 31 attack on a Russian-occupied territory in the southern Kherson region killed or wounded about 500 Russian troops.
Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield reports.
Donetsk region governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said in an update to his region on Tuesday morning that Russian troops had attacked Ukrainian positions along the front line overnight, killing one person in the Ukrainian-occupied city of Bakhmut.
Russian military bloggers said the extent of destruction at Makiivka resulted from ammunition being stored in the same building as a barracks, despite commanders knowing it was within range of Ukrainian missiles.
Igor Girkin, a former commander of pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine who is now one of Russia’s leading nationalist military bloggers, said hundreds were killed or injured. Military equipment stored at the site was not camouflaged, he said.
RUSSIAN FURY
“What happened in Makiivka is terrible,” wrote Archangel Spetznaz Z, a Russian military blogger with more than 700,000 followers on the Telegram messaging app.
“Who came up with the idea of putting 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 killed?” He wrote. Commanders “didn’t care,” he said.
Ukraine almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy did not mention the Makiivka strike in his nightly speech on Monday.
However, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported the Makiivka attack as “an attack against Russian manpower and military equipment”. It made no mention of casualties.
Anger in Russia spread to lawmakers.
Grigory Karasin, a member of the Russian Senate and former deputy foreign minister, demanded not only revenge against Ukraine and its NATO supporters, but also “demanding internal analysis”.
Sergei Mironov, a legislator and former chairman of the Senate, Russia’s upper house, demanded criminal liability for the officials who “allowed the concentration of military personnel in an unprotected building” and “any higher authorities who failed to provide the proper level of protection “. safety”.
Unverified footage posted online of the aftermath of the blast at the Russian army barracks in Makiivka showed a massive building reduced to smoking rubble.
Some of the dead came from the southwestern Russian region of Samara, the region’s governor told Russian media, urging concerned relatives to contact recruitment centers for information.
After suffering defeats on the battlefield in the second half of 2022, Russia resorted to massive airstrikes against Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down all 39 drones launched by Russia during a third night of airstrikes against civilian targets in Kiev and other cities.
Ukrainian officials said their success proved that Russia’s tactics of shooting down missiles and drones to knock down Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in recent months were increasingly failing as Kiev beefs up its air defenses.
Russia denies attacking civilians in what it calls a “special military operation” against its southern neighbor that began Feb. 24.
After Russia fired dozens of missiles on Dec. 31, Russia launched more than 80 Iranian-made Shahed drones on Jan. 1 and 2, all of which were shot down, Zelenskiy said. attacks to “exhaust” Ukraine.
“It’s probably based on exhaustion. Our people, our air defenses, exhaust our energy,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
Ukraine, he said, had to “do and do everything to ensure that the terrorists do not reach their goal, as all their others have failed”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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