Moscow has come under fire after it acknowledged the major fatality count in one of the deadliest strikes in the 10-month-old war. The acknowledgement resulted in outrage among Russian nationalists who demanded that the country’s commanders be punished.
Russia acknowledged on Monday that dozens of its troops were killed in what would be one of the deadliest strikes in the war to date. The Russian defense ministry said 63 soldiers were killed in a strike that destroyed the temporary barracks in a former vocational college in Makiivka, the twin city of the Russian-occupied capital of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
The ministry said the barracks were hit by four rockets fired from US-provided HIMARS launchers. The ministry claimed that two of the rockets were shot down. Ukraine said the Russian death toll is in the hundreds, but pro-Russian officials said the estimate by Kyiv was an exaggeration.
Russian military bloggers said the incident was because ammunition was stored in the same place as the barracks, even as commanders knew it was within the range of Ukrainian rockets. In videos posted online, a former pro-Russian unit commander in eastern Ukraine and military blogger Igor Girkin said hundreds of Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded in the blast.
Girkin said ammunition was stored at the site, and the military equipment was camouflaged. Another Russian nationalist blogger named Rybar said around 70 were killed, and over 100 troops were wounded.
On the same day, Ukraine said it shot down all 39 drones Russia fired for the third consecutive night of air strikes on civilian targets across the country. Ukrainian officials said their success was an indication that Russia’s strategy of firing a barrage of rockets to attack Ukraine’s critical infrastructure was more of a failure as Kyiv bolsters its air defenses.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned on Monday that Russia is gearing up for a protracted long-term campaign of strikes across Ukraine using Iran-made Shahed-136 drones with the goal of wearing down Ukraine.
“We have information that Russia is planning a protracted attack using Shahed drones,” said Zelenskyy in his nightly video address. “It is probably banking on exhaustion. Exhausting our people, our anti-aircraft defenses, our energy.”