MOSCOW(Reuters) January,3– Russian nationalists and some parliamentarians ignored the danger amid growing anger over the killing of dozens of Russian soldiers in one of the deadliest attacks of the Ukraine conflict called for the punishment of the commander.
The Russian Defense Ministry said 63 soldiers were killed in a New Year’s Eve blast that destroyed a makeshift barracks at a vocational school in Makyovka, the sister city of Donetsk, the capital of Russia-held eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian and some Russian nationalist bloggers have put the death toll in Makyivka in the hundreds, but pro-Russian officials say these estimates are exaggerated.
RIA Novosti news agency reports that rallies in memory of the dead have been held in several Russian cities. Mourners arranged flowers in central Samara. Ukrainian officials said Russia attacked Ukrainian-controlled areas of the Donetsk region on Monday, attacking the village of Yakovlyvka, the town of Kramatorsk and destroying a skating rink in the town of Drushkivka.
The governor of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, which together with neighboring Donetsk form the industrial Donbass claimed by Moscow, said on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces were advancing steadily toward Russian-held Svatove and Kreminna.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian military chiefs said about 500 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded in an attack on Russian-held territory in the southern Kherson region on December 31.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the battlefield report. The Ukrainian president’s office said three people were killed and 10 wounded in the past 24 hours in Russian attacks, two in the Kherson region and one in the Donetsk region.
Donetsk Governor Pablo Kirilenko said in an update to his region on Tuesday morning that Russian forces had attacked Ukrainian positions along the front lines overnight.
Reuters footage showed his team of Ukrainian volunteers, known as ‘Black Tulip’, digging up the bodies of dead soldiers near the front lines in the Donetsk region.
A Russian military blogger said the extent of the destruction at Makievka was because ammunition was stored in the same building as the barracks, even though commanders knew it was within range of Ukrainian missiles.
Hundreds were killed or wounded, said Igor Gherkin, a former commander of pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and now one of the most prominent Russian Nationalist Army bloggers. Military equipment stored at the site is not camouflaged, he said.
“What happened in Makiewka is terrible,” wrote Archangel Spetsnaz Z, a Russian military blogger with more than 700,000 followers on the messaging app Telegram.
Ukraine rarely takes public responsibility for attacks on Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine, and Zelensky did not mention Makievka’s attack in his late-night speech on Monday.
An unconfirmed video of the aftermath of an explosion at a Russian barracks in Makyovka has surfaced online, showing the huge building puffing smoke and crumbling to rubble. After being defeated on the battlefield in late 2022, Russia resorted to massive airstrikes against Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine announced on Monday that it had shot down all 39 of her drones launched by Russia on the night of her third day of airstrikes against civilian targets in Kyiv and other cities.
Ukrainian officials say Russia’s tactics in recent months to bring down missiles and drones to shut down Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have increasingly backfired as Kyiv beefs up its air defenses. He said he has proven success.
Russia denies targeting civilians in a so-called “military special operation” against its southern neighbor launched on February 24.
