The fact is sufficiently rare to be underlined. Usually reluctant to give information on the level of its losses, the Russian Ministry of Defense acknowledged, Monday, January 2, the death of 63 soldiers during a bombardment carried out by the Ukrainian army in Makiivka, an industrial city located in the Donetsk region occupied by Moscow and located about fifteen kilometers from the front. According to sources close to the Ukrainian authorities, the toll would even amount to 400 dead and 300 injured, figures that are impossible to verify.
To read the testimonies published on social networks, a building of the university of Makiivka serving as a dormitory for the Russian mobilized would have been hit by several projectiles on New Year’s night, literally blowing the three levels of the building. Six missiles were fired from US-made HIMARS rocket launchers at “a temporary deployment center” of the army, said Igor Konashenkov, the spokesman of the Russian Ministry of Defense, acknowledging that only two of these projectiles had been intercepted by the Russian anti-aircraft defense.
In a message published on January 2 on Telegramthe Russian military blogger Rybar, very followed in his country, assures that“about 600 people” were in the building when it was bombed, a concentration far too large not to be spotted, he believes. According to various sources, it was the transmissions from the mobile phones of Russian soldiers, who had recently arrived in the Donbass and wanted to give their news to their families, which would have enabled the Ukrainian artillerymen to detect their presence. An ammunition depot and vehicles were also reportedly destroyed in the blast.
Trampling armies
As deadly as it is, this major attack is not the first carried out by the Ukrainians. In May 2022, an entire column of Russian armor trying to cross the Seversky Donets River in northeastern Ukraine using a pontoon bridge came under fire from the 17e armored brigade of the kyiv army. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then published satellite photos showing dozens of tanks and personnel carriers, charred hundreds of meters deep, suggesting a toll of several hundred dead and wounded.
The Makiivka attack comes as the Russian and Ukrainian armies have been trampling for several weeks on some 800 kilometers of the front. Since the evacuation of the city of Kherson by troops from Moscow on November 9, 2022 and the recapture of the right bank of the Dnieper River by Ukrainian forces, neither of the two belligerents has recorded any significant success. Intense fighting is still taking place around the town of Bakhmut, but attacks and counter-attacks follow one another without significant progress. The humid weather and the absence of prolonged frost make the ground very muddy, which hampers manoeuvres.
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