89 Russian Soldiers Killed In Single Ukrainian Missile Attack
Russia suffered its worst military losses since the war in Ukraine in an attack on 1 January.
Russian officials said that 89 servicemen were killed in Makiivka in eastern Ukraine while Ukraine claimed to have killed nearly 400 Russian soldiers in the attack.
On Monday Russia’s defence ministry acknowledged that 63 Russian soldiers had been killed in a strike in Makiivka.
Makiivka is a small city in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which has been under the control of pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
A senior Russian military official, Lt Gen Sergei Sevryukov, said Ukraine had hit a temporary base in Makiivka at 12:01 am local time on 1 January, using a US-supplied Himars rocket system.
On Wednesday, the ministry revised the death toll upwards to 89 after more bodies were discovered.
The Ukrainian army’s strategic communications department said that nearly 400 soldiers were killed and 300 injured in the strike in Makiivka.
Russia’s defence ministry has blamed the unauthorised use of mobile phones by its soldiers for the deadly Ukrainian missile attack.
In a statement issued just after 1 AM (22:00 GMT Tuesday) on Wednesday, the Russian defence ministry said:
This factor allowed the enemy to track and determine the coordinates of the soldiers’ location for a missile strike.
The announcement of the large number of losses caused shock in Russia, with some prominent bloggers criticising the “incompetence” of the Russian high command. | The Guardian
