Moscow said a Ukrainian air strike on army barracks in the Russian-occupied town of Makiivka killed 63 soldiers, in one of the bloodiest blows to the Kremlin’s ground forces since the start of the war.
The defence ministry said four high-explosive missiles struck the town’s temporary deployment base — a school building that stood near an ammunition dump and weapons cache. Two additional missiles were shot down by Russian air defences, it added, without saying when the attack occurred.
Russian military bloggers suggested casualties were far greater than the official figures, claiming that hundreds of newly mobilised troops had died or were missing. While not taking credit for the strike, the Ukrainian military said in a Telegram post that the Makiivka attack took place on New Year’s eve, killing 400 Russian soldiers and injuring 300.
The air strike shows the damage western-supplied Himars missiles can inflict on Russian forces, who were forced to retreat in the face of Ukrainian counter-offensive in the east and south last year. But it also underlines poor tactical judgment from the Russian army commanders, according to analysts.
Rob Lee, senior fellow at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, commented on Twitter: “One of the problems with relying on mobilised soldiers is that it is more difficult to disperse them because of a lack of small unit leadership . . . But housing them next to ammunition storage is simply a leadership failure.”
The criticism was echoed by Russian army bloggers, who described the event as a disaster and called for commanders who made the decision to place such a large number of troops in one unprotected building to be punished.
The strike comes as the two parties are locked in a war of attrition near the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut. Russia’s repeated airborne attacks on military and civilian infrastructure have also become less intense in recent days as Moscow has started to run low on stocks of cruise missiles, according to Ukrainian and western military officials.
In a change of tactics that seeks to swamp Ukraine’s air defences, Moscow has instead turned to Iran-supplied drones, which are cheaper to use, if easier to shoot down. On Monday it launched 39 drones on Kyiv, all of which were destroyed, according to Ukraine’s air forces.
“Russia has enough missiles left for two massive strikes on Ukraine,” Ukrainian spy chief Kyrylo Budanov said in an end-of-year interview on Ukrainian television. “They are reducing the number in order to [maintain] the intensity of these missile attacks.”
One western-supplied air defence system, known as NASAMs, has been central in defending the capital, according to Ukraine’s air forces. Western countries have large stocks of the Aim-120 missiles that the NASAMs use, but they each cost about $1mn, compared with the less than $20,000 cost of Iran-supplied Shahed drones.
Ukraine also reportedly launched two airborne drone attacks on Russian territory overnight.
Alexander Bogomaz, governor of Russian oblast Bryansk, said that “a Ukrainian drone” damaged a power supply facility in Klymov district, about 100km from the Ukraine border, in the early hours of January 2.
Ukrainian kamikaze drones also reportedly bombed the Baltimore military airfield in Voronezh, another 160km inside Russia, according to social media reports.
The attack, unconfirmed by Ukrainian authorities, follows the pattern of other recent cross-border drone strikes on Russian military installations.
Ukrainian officials have abstained from commenting on such strikes, such as the dramatic attack in early December on the Engels airfield near Saratov in southern Russia about 600km from the Ukraine border.
But Budanov, who leads Ukraine’s military intelligence, said in a recent interview that while he would not confirm that Ukraine was striking military air bases in Russia, he did believe that these strikes were likely to “move deeper and deeper” inside the country.