On New Year’s Eve, a school building in the Russian-occupied town of Makezhevka in Donetsk Oblast was hit by a Ukrainian airstrike.
The Russian Ministry of Defense now claims that 89 soldiers were killed in the attack on a school in Makezhevka in the Donetsk region.
Earlier, Russia admitted that 63 soldiers were killed, which in itself is a very rare admission of loss on the Russian side.
Russian authorities blame the unauthorized use of mobile phones by their soldiers as the cause of the attack. They claim this allowed the Ukrainians to know their whereabouts.
On the Ukrainian side, 400 soldiers were allegedly killed and 300 wounded.
The Russian authorities said in a statement that they are investigating the circumstances surrounding the attack, and that those responsible for this tragedy must be held accountable.
A number of Russian military bloggers, who later demanded a heads up for military officials, also claimed that the death toll was in the hundreds.
They are highly critical that so many soldiers were stationed in one place, within the radius of the US-made Ukrainian HIMARS.
A prominent military blogger Igor Girkin, who himself was the commander-in-chief of the army of the pro-Russian autonomous authorities in occupied Donetsk, goes to message on Telegram With a much higher death toll than the Russian authorities do.
– Considering the number of victims, there are no final figures yet, as many of them are still missing (still under the rubble). In his letter, he wrote that the number of dead and wounded is several hundred.
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