A significant number of Russian recruits were killed in a Ukrainian New Year’s Eve attack in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine’s Donetsk province, a source close to the Russian-appointed leadership said on Monday.
Key points:
- Ukraine says as many as 400 Russian recruits were killed in a missile strike. Russia says the number is 63
- The recruits were in temporary accommodation at a vocational college on New Year’s Eve
- A former FSB officer says ammunition had been stored in the same building
Footage posted online, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed a building purported to be a vocational college in the mining town of Makiivka reduced to a field of smouldering rubble.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said as many as 400 Russians had been killed, while Russia’s Defence Ministry confirmed that 63 servicemen had been killed.
The Donetsk source, who declined to be named, said: “According to my information, there are fewer than 100 killed so far.”
“What is being reported [by Ukraine] is greatly exaggerated. Fifty-eight wounded were brought in overnight, which is a lot for a normal day and not much if you believe the information about hundreds of dead,” the source said.
“It was a site for mobilised Russian recruits.”
In its daily report on Sunday, Russia’s defence ministry said it had destroyed seven HIMARS rockets fired by Ukrainian forces, including near Makiivka.
Russia has mobilised at least 300,000 soldiers since September, sending them to bolster its faltering military campaign in Ukraine.
‘There were dead and wounded’
Daniil Bezsonov, a senior Russian-backed regional official in the Moscow-controlled parts of the Donetsk region, acknowledged the vocational school had been hit by US-made HIMARS rockets at around midnight, as people in the region would have been celebrating the start of the new year.
“There was a massive strike on the vocational school from American MLRS HIMARS,” Mr Bezsonov said on the Telegram messaging app.
“There were dead and wounded, the exact number is still unknown. The building itself was badly damaged.”
Igor Girkin, a nationalist and former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who helped Russia annex Crimea in 2014 and then organise pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, said in a Telegram post on Monday morning that “the number of dead and wounded runs into many hundreds”.
Mr Girkin, who has bitterly criticised Russia’s military failures in Ukraine, said ammunition had been stored in the same building where the recruits had been accommodated.
“This is not the only such [extremely dense] deployment of personnel and equipment in the destruction zone of HIMARS missiles,” he wrote.
“And — yes — this is not the first such case.”
Reuters