From Reuters:
“Russia says dozens of its
troops killed in attack in eastern Ukraine”
(Ukrainian servicemen prepare
cannon shells before firing them towards positions of Russian troops, amid
Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Donetsk region, Ukraine January 1, 2023.)
Russia has acknowledged that
dozens 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. In a rare disclosure,
Russia's defence ministry said 63 soldiers had died on New Year's Eve 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 in
eastern Ukraine. Four rockets fired from U.S.-made HIMARS launchers hit the
site, the defence ministry said. It said two rockets had been shot down.
Ukraine said the Russian death toll was in the hundreds, though pro-Russian
officials called this an exaggeration. Russian military bloggers said the huge
destruction was a result of storing ammunition in the same building as a
barracks, despite commanders knowing it was within range of Ukrainian rockets. 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 the capital
Kyiv and other cities. Ukrainian officials said their success proved that
Russia's tactic in recent months of raining down missiles and drones to knock
out Ukraine's energy infrastructure was increasingly a failure as Kyiv beefs up
its air defences more than 10 months since Russian forces invaded.
RUSSIAN BLOGGERS CRITICAL Unverified
footage posted online of the aftermath of the blast at the Russian barracks in
Makiivka showed a huge 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 local recruitment centres
for information. "There are wounded, alas, there are dead," state
news outlet TASS quoted regional governor Dmitry Azarov as saying. Igor Girkin,
a former commander of pro-Russian troops in eastern Ukraine who is now one of
the highest profile Russian nationalist military bloggers, said hundreds and
been killed or wounded in the blast. Ammunition had been stored at the site and
military equipment there was uncamouflaged, he said. "What happened
in Makiivka is horrible," wrote Archangel Spetznaz Z, another Russian
military blogger with more than 700,000 followers on the Telegram messaging
app. Ukrainian servicemen prepare cannon shells before firing them towards
positions of Russian troops in Donetsk region “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. The open fury extended to
lawmakers. Grigory Karasin, a member of the Russian Senate and former deputy
foreign minister, not only demanded vengeance against Ukraine and its NATO
supporters but also "an exacting internal analysis". Sergei Mironov,
a legislator and former chairman of the Senate, Russia's upper house, demanded
criminal liability for the officials who had "allowed the concentration of
military personnel in an unprotected building" and "all the higher authorities
who did not provide the proper level of security".
NO CLAIM OF RESPONSIBILITY 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. The Kyiv
government almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks on
Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
did not address the strike in his nightly speech on Monday. Russia has
seen in the new year with nightly attacks on Ukrainian cities, some hundreds of
kilometres from the front lines. This marks a change in tactics after months in
which Moscow usually spaced such strikes around a week apart. Russia has
turned to mass air strikes against Ukrainian cities since suffering defeats on
the battlefield in the second half of 2022. After firing dozens of
missiles on Dec. 31, Russia launched more than 80 Iranian-made Shahed drones on
Jan. 1 and Jan. 2, all of which had been shot down, Zelenskiy said. "That
number may rise in the very near future. In the weeks to come, the nights could
be far from peaceful," he said. Zelenskiy said Russia's attacks
would prove useless "because we stand united. They are united only by fear."
^ Дід Мороз (Ukrainian for Father
Frost – who brings Ukrainian Children their Presents on New Year’s) gave the
world another great present for 2023: Between 63 (which Russia claims) and 400
(which Ukraine claims) Russian Soldiers in Russian-Occupied Ukraine were killed by a Ukrainian Strike.
Putin and the Russians may not
understand what a Military Target is and constantly attack and kill innocent
Ukrainian Civilians, but the Ukrainians do understand.
That puts the number of Russian
Soldiers killed in the past 10 months at around 102,450. ^
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