"Ukrainian rockets struck a building housing Russian soldiers.... killing 63 service members, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday."
Posted by
prayformojo (aka mayhem)
Jan 2 '23, 07:00
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Ukrainian rockets struck a building housing Russian soldiers in an occupied city in Donetsk early on New Year’s Day, killing 63 service members, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday. Ukraine claimed that hundreds were killed, but even the lower figure would represent one of the deadliest single strikes against Russian forces in Ukraine since the war began.
A spokesman for the Russian-installed proxy government in the Donetsk region, Daniil Bezsonov, called the strike in the city of Makiivka “a massive blow.” The Ukrainian military claimed that “about 400” Russian soldiers had died, although that figure could not be independently verified.
Ukraine hit the building using HIMARS, a guided rocket system supplied by the United States whose range of dozens of miles has for months helped Kyiv’s forces strike deep behind the front lines. The system is part of a growing arsenal of sophisticated Western weapons that have helped Ukraine change the course of the conflict.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said that four HIMARS rockets hit the soldiers’ temporary base in Makiivka. The strike, which took place shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, immediately provoked outrage among some of Russia’s pro-war military commentators, who said it represented the latest example of Russian military commanders’ ineptitude in the war and their disregard for the lives of Russian soldiers.
A former Russian paramilitary commander in Ukraine, Igor Girkin, confirmed the seriousness of the disaster, writing on Telegram, the social messaging app, that “many hundreds” were dead and wounded, but added that many people “remained under the rubble.”
The building, described by both Russian and Ukrainian officials as a vocational school, was “almost completely destroyed” because “ammunition stored in the same building” detonated in the strike, said Mr. Girkin, also known as Igor Strelkov. Video posted on social media showed firefighters at a severely damaged building and piles of steaming rubble.
The Makiivka strike comes as Russian military bloggers, who have become influential opinion makers in Russia amid the censorship of mainstream media, are calling for an overhaul of their country’s military command, which they say is dragging Russia toward defeat in Ukraine, or at least years of heavy losses.
Some bloggers said that the victims in Makiivka included men from the Saratov and Samara regions of central Russia, who had been recently mobilized in President Vladimir V. Putin’s drive to conscript more recruits into the fighting in Ukraine. “No one is assuming the responsibility for the needless deaths,” one blogger, Anastasia Kashevarova, wrote on her Telegram channel.
In particular, the bloggers criticized the Russian state media’s claim that the attack was caused by the soldiers’ use of cellphones, which helped Ukrainian forces pinpoint their location. “Preliminarily, the reason for the HIMARS hit was active use of cellular phones by the newly arrived servicemen,” Russian state media reported.
The bloggers said that this official explanation shifted the blame on the victims, without explaining why commanders housed the recently arrived conscripts in dense quarters in an unprotected building within reach of U.S.-made rockets.
Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions that the Kremlin illegally annexed in October, has remained the site of some of the heaviest fighting in Ukraine, even though little ground has changed hands there for months. Intense artillery battles have raged as Moscow attempts to bring in reinforcements, including newly mobilized soldiers.
The city of Makiivka, which forms part of the metropolitan area of the regional capital of Donetsk, is well within range of Ukraine’s longer-range artillery on the other side of the region’s jagged frontline.
The attack came weeks after another long range Ukrainian strike against Russian forces in Donbas, the eastern industrial area that includes Donetsk and the neighboring Luhansk region. In December, an attack on a hotel in the city of Kadiivka, in Luhansk, killed members of the Wagner paramilitary group who were using it as a base, according to Ukrainian authorities in the region. The Wagner force, whose leader has close ties to Mr. Putin, has played a significant role in Moscow’s war effort in Donetsk.
— Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Anatoly Kurmanaev
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