The killing of dozens of Russian soldiers in a Kyiv-led missile attack on a barracks in occupied eastern Ukraine has fueled recriminations in Moscow over its conduct of the war – and raised new questions about the military’s capacity to learn from its mistakes.
Russia says 89 of its troops were killed when a precision rocket destroyed a vocational college in Makiivka in Donetsk province on New Year’s Eve. The school was occupied as a temporary barracks for a battalion of mobilized soldiers. The basement was reportedly used as an ammunition store and exploded in the attack.
Kyiv claims the Russian death toll is several times higher. But the figure, initially 63 and then updated to 89 later on Tuesday, was still the highest death toll in the war in a single incident acknowledged by Moscow and the first official comment on any casualties since September, a sign that the Kremlin is adjusting. a narrative about war.
The deaths sparked outrage among Russian pro-war military bloggers and calls for commanders to be punished for allowing so many soldiers to be stationed together and in unprotected buildings.
“Makiivka is criminal negligence,” Pavel Gubarev, who has been fighting with pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine since 2014, wrote on Telegram. “This is the mistake of the spring-summer of 2022. We are fighting for 11 months. It is important to live in small groups – everyone knows. The mobilized may not know, but the authorities must know!
Igor Girkin, a former Russian intelligence officer who led Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014, became infamous for his brutality, Makiivka said “this is not the first case – there were many cases like last year. But our generals cannot be trained in principle.
Ukraine’s general staff on Tuesday claimed about 500 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded in another long-range artillery attack on New Year’s Eve, this time in Chulakivka, in southern Kherson province, but gave no further details and there was no confirmation from Russian sources. . .
Since the summer, Ukrainian forces have used precision-guided missiles or Himars supplied from the west, with a range of about 70km, to attack Russian troop concentrations, command posts, weapons depots and supply routes. The missile gives Ukraine a significant strike capability, forcing Moscow to adapt its tactics.
Dara Massicot, a Russian military expert at the Rand Corporation think-tank, said: “The Russian military has learned to move its command and control and main logistics depots out of Himars since late summer. This change has reduced the overall number of high-value targets that Ukrainian forces can attack.
“Setting so many in one site is a mistake. With senior commanders staying away from the front, it is likely that this local incident will happen. This time, the Ukrainians took advantage of the mistake.
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Officials in the Donetsk People’s Republic blamed the Makiivka attack, according to state news agency Tass, on conscripts using cellphones, giving positions to the Ukrainian military, a claim repeated by the Russian defense ministry on Tuesday night.
But others described this as an attempt to blame the soldiers themselves for the events. “Of course, it’s easier to blame the dead,” said pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda war reporter Alexander Kots, writing on Telegram.
State media reporter and local politician Andrei Medvedev wrote on Telegram: “The soldier who easily uses the phone, it turns out that he was the one to blame.”
Many of the soldiers killed in the attack on the Makiivka barracks came from the central Russian city of Samara, Dmitry Azarov, the regional governor, said on Friday.
The city on Tuesday held a memorial service for the dead – a rare formal public display for soldiers killed in battle. The Kremlin has previously tried to distance the conflict from the public, calling the invasion a “special military operation” and denying the human cost.
But since announcing mass mobilization in the fall, Russian leaders have increasingly portrayed the conflict as an all-out patriotic war. In his traditional New Year’s speech, shown on state television before midnight, President Vladimir Putin for the first time did not stand in front of the Kremlin but was surrounded by tired soldiers.
“The Russians have been able to remove the waves of anger from Russian social media before,” Massicot said. “If the Kremlin wants to reduce pressure, it can certainly find the local commanders responsible and make a show of punishing them, if they choose. This event is different because it involves mobilized forces, which may explain why Russia is so quick to offer the number of victims, which may be less in number due to the scale of the damage.
In Samara, mourning events were held at the city’s second world war memorial. Local news reported that around 500 people took part, and video showed people placing red carnations with the eternal flame. Some of the women looked confused.
Ekaterina Kolotovkina, the wife of the commander of the 2nd Guards Combined Arms Army, a military division traditionally stationed in the Samara region, addressed the meeting.
“Now it is very difficult for me to speak. I have not slept for three days. Samara has not slept for three days,” said Kolotovkina. He added that he and his wife have spent time since the attack calling relatives of the soldiers who died.
“We are constantly calling the husband’s wife. This is very difficult, difficult and scary,” said Kolotovkina.
However, Kolotovkina, who has appeared several times in Russian state media giving patriotic interviews as a soldier’s wife, ended it rudely, saying that she had asked her husband to “avenge” his death. “We will not be broken. Sadness unites us,” he said. “We will destroy the enemy together.”
Additional reporting by John Paul Rathbone in Kyiv