Makiivka school number 19 became the grave of dozens – or hundreds – of Russian soldiers that New Year’s Eve. Makiivka is a mining town on the outskirts of the provincial capital Donetsk, an area in eastern Ukraine occupied by Russia since 2014. At school 19, where ammunition was also stored, that night a battalion of the last conscripts was concentrated in Moscow last fall. A Ukrainian attack using Himar artillery destroyed the school-turned-base and claimed the lives of up to 400 Russian soldiers, according to the Ukrainian General Staff. The Russian Defense Ministry lowers the figure to 63, but other sources close to the invading army estimate the death toll is close to 200 recruits.
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Kyiv claims it dealt the deadliest blow of the war. This would be the case even if the actual number were halfway between the Ukrainian army’s estimate of 400 dead and Moscow’s 63, ie about 200 liquidated soldiers. Russia’s Defense Ministry added in its daily bulletin on Monday that its bombings killed 70 Ukrainian Foreign Legion soldiers at three bases in Kharkiv and Donetsk provinces. The Ukrainian General Staff did not provide any information.
The attack has drawn a spate of criticism from Russian analysts who are following the invading forces, believing there was gross negligence. Russian state agency TASS, citing local military authorities in Donetsk, reported that Ukrainian forces were able to identify the target thanks to the high concentration of cellphone signals in the building. The rules of both armies are strict to prevent the concentration of troops from being detected from the transmission of mobile data or the location of the devices’ GPS signals.
Nexta, a well-known digital communications medium in Eastern Europe, said that the identification of the target was made thanks to information from the United States telecommunications espionage network. This was reported by some Russian media, although it is also common for the Ukrainian army to receive information about enemy movements from people loyal to Kyiv in the occupied territories. In the regions close to the front it is also possible to identify the location of mobile phones on the other side of the ditch of telephone poles in both sectors.
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The Russian Defense Ministry has confirmed that the base was shelled with US-supplied Himars precision artillery, one of the key weapons in Ukraine’s counteroffensive. With a 50-mile radius of action, the Himars have been the nightmare of Russia’s rear, repeatedly disrupting the supply chain of arms and military equipment and forcing Moscow troops to move their arsenals even further from the front lines.
The precautions against the Himars were not applied in Makiivka. The videos, shared by residents of the city on social networks, show that the explosion at the base took place at midnight on January 1 and that the detonation was so powerful that the bodies of several soldiers were thrown tens of meters away. Images circulated by the Russian media confirm that the barracks were vandalized.
Igor Girkin, a veteran Russian officer from the Donbass war who was convicted by international justice, published a text on January 1 estimating the death toll at 200. Girkin criticized “the generals’ inability to train [rusos]” for allowing such a concentration of units and because Ukraine has demonstrated the effectiveness of the Himars. Prominent Russian Military Telegram channels on the front added that at least 100 soldiers were killed. The Gray Zone, one of the reference Telegram accounts within the Russian army in Ukraine, reported that a maximum of 150 soldiers could have gathered in the building and that the death toll would be 130. The Gray Zone and Sasha Kots, a Russian journalist accompanying the invading army, have expressed dissatisfaction among the troops because they believe soldiers are being blamed for not turning off their cell phones. “After ten months of war, it is dangerous and criminal to think that the enemy is an idiot and has no eyes in everything,” Kots wrote. “Incompetence and incompetence continue to be a serious problem,” he added.
Ukraine dealt a similar blow in the country’s southern Kherson region last October when it destroyed a headquarters of Russian Chechen forces, killing at least 40 people, according to Ukrainian forces. For its part, Russia claimed to have liquidated 200 Ukrainian soldiers in the railway commune of Chaplino in Dnipro province last August. The Kiev authorities never admitted that there were soldiers there, but witnesses interviewed by EL PAÍS at the scene confirmed that dozens of soldiers were killed.
In March 2022, a few weeks after the invasion began, Russia bombed a barracks in Mikolayiv province, killing between 40 and 100 recruits, according to the AFP agency. Another popular Russian war analyst, military informant Voienii Osvodomitel, noted that attacks like the one in Mykolayiv had taught the Ukrainian high command to disperse troops without massing them and into less exposed buildings. “If responsibility isn’t transferred to an official level, if the media doesn’t dare to give the first and last names of the well-known people responsible, everyone will show that nothing happened,” the source lamented.
The attack in Makiivka coincided with a full-scale Russian missile and drone bombing attack on Kyiv. Since the evening of December 31, the Russian Air Force has been relentlessly punishing the Ukrainian capital. The early morning of Jan. 2 was once again filled with fear and agony in the city when more than 22 Shahed drones arrived out of a total of 39 launched in the country, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. The explosions repeated until after three in the morning. The vast majority of the unmanned vehicles were shot down by anti-aircraft defenses, but two hit their targets and Kyiv’s power grid suffered renewed damage, leading to fresh blackouts on Monday. Two dozen houses in the capital were damaged, but no one was killed.
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