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.
| Russia acknowledged on Monday that scores of its troops were killed in one of the Ukraine war’s deadliest strikes, drawing demands from Russian nationalist bloggers for commanders to be punished for housing soldiers alongside an ammunition dump.
Separately, Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down all 39 drones Russia had fired in a 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.
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.
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 whenRussia has seen in the new year with nightly attacks on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, hundreds of kilometres from the front lines. This marks a change in tactics after months in which Moscow usually spaced such strikes roughly a week apart.
In his nightly speech, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia’s efforts would prove useless. “Drones, missiles, everything else will not help them,” he said of the Russians. “Because we stand united. They are united only by fear.”Ukraine’s air defence systems worked through the night to bring down incoming drones and to warn communities of the approaching danger.
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