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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.
Russia’s defense ministry said 63 soldiers had died 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.
It said the accommodation had been hit by four rockets fired from U.S.-made HIMARS launchers, claiming two rockets had been shot down. Kyiv 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 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 defenses.
Unverified footage posted online of the aftermath of the strike on the Russian barracks in Makiivka showed a huge building reduced to smoking rubble.
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.
