The deadly Ukrainian attack exposes Moscow’s military failures

In one of their deadliest attacks to date on Russian forces, the Ukrainians used US-made rockets to kill dozens — and possibly hundreds — of Moscow’s troops in a New Year’s behind-the-scenes attack, prompting outraged war hawks Russians to accuse their military of lethal incompetence.

The missile attack HIMARS killed 63 Russian soldiers in a building housing them in the occupied eastern Ukrainian city of Makiivka, Russia’s defense ministry said on Monday, an unusual admission for a serviceman who has often refused to acknowledge serious losses.

A former Russian paramilitary commander in Ukraine, Igor Girkin, wrote on the Telegram app that there were “many hundreds“of dead and wounded and that many “were left under the rubble”.

Ukrainian military officials said “some 400″ Russian soldierseven if they did not explicitly say that Ukraine was behind the attack.

Neither claim can be independently verified, but even the lower figure would represent one of the worst Russian losses in a single episode of the war and an embarrassment to the Russian president. Vladimir Putin.

He has repeatedly vowed to correct the glaring mistakes and weaknesses of his military that the war has exposed, and in a New Year’s Eve speech filmed at a military base, Putin told the families of soldiers killed in the fighting:

“I share your pain with all my heart.”

Russian pro-war bloggers and some government officials said the debacle was caused by the own repeated and costly mistakes by the military, such as garrisoning troops in a dense concentration within Ukrainian artillery range, locating them in the same building as an ammunition depot, and allowing them to use cell phones, the signals from which Ukrainians can use to locate their objective.

“In principle, our generals are untrainable,” wrote Girkin, who used the nom de guerre of Igor Strelkov.

Some pro-war lawmakers have called for an investigation and one of them, Sergei Mironov, the leader of a pro-Kremlin party in parliament, has called for the prosecution of all officers responsible,”whether they wear shoulder pads or not“.

“It is evident that neither intelligence nor counterintelligence nor air defense worked properly,” he said.

The attack was “a massive blow‘said a spokesman for the Russian-installed substitute government in the Donetsk region, Daniil Bezsonov.

“The enemy has inflicted the most serious defeats on us in this war not because of his coolness and talent, but because of our mistakes,” he wrote in a Telegram message.

More than 10 months after an invasion that the Russians – and many Ukrainians – thought would produce a quick Russian victory, each side has suffered more than 100,000 dead and woundedby Western estimates, and the war has become a war of attrition, with no sign of an end in sight.

Some of the most intense fighting in recent times has ravaged the region of Donetskone of four the Kremlin intended to annex in September, even though its troops were losing ground there, giving up the cities they had captured earlier in the war.

Since then, the fighting in the region has dwindled to bloody combat, with the Ukrainians looking for places to increase their advantage, while the Russians build trenches and fortifications along the front lines and try to capture the city of Bakhmut.

Russia launched a barrage of Iranian-made explosive drones into Ukraine on Monday, continuing its barrage against cities and civilian infrastructure, especially the power grid.

But it appears that Ukraine’s increasingly effective air defenses have kept the damage to a minimum.

The Ukrainian military said on Monday that 22 drones were shot down over Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in the early hours of the morning, but at least two loud explosions were heard in the city.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko said some energy infrastructure was damaged, affecting systems that heat buildings.

It is unclear whether the explosions were caused by drones evading air defences, drones shot down but exploding on landfall or by air defense missiles.

The Ukrainian military claimed to have shot down the 45 Shahed drones Iranian missiles launched over the weekend, although some cruise missiles have penetrated their defences.

In his late night video speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Monday:

“We have information that Russia is planning a sustained attack with Shaheds,” aiming to deplete Ukraine’s defenses and resilience.

He said: “Now is the time when everyone involved in protecting the sky should be especially vigilant.”

In the deadly attack on Russian forces in Makiivka, HIMARS rocket artillery was used to strike a vocational training school where troops were stationed, Moscow reported.

The Russian Defense Ministry said four HIMARS rockets hit the building and two more were shot down by Russian air defences.

As pro-war bloggers and officials reacted furiously, a video posted on social media showed firefighters amidst the ruins of the facility, reduced to smoking piles of rubble.

Bloggers have become influential opinion makers in Russia due to mainstream media censorship.

Girkin, blogger and former paramilitary commander, wrote that the Makiivka vocational school was “almost completely destroyed” because “the stored ammunition in the same building” exploded in the attack.

The munitions were stockpiled “without the slightest disguise,” he wrote, adding that similar attacks had occurred earlier in the year, albeit with fewer casualties.

Dara Massicot, senior policy researcher at Rand Corp., noted that Russian officials “usually don’t provide this kind of information after a major loss, which suggests they want control the narrative about this event.”

Makiivka, adjacent to the city of Donetsk, is only about 16 kilometers from the nearest Ukrainian territory, the city of Avdiivka to the north-west, well within a radius of aboutand 80 kilometers of the HIMARS rockets that the United States sent to Ukraine.

A US military official declined to comment on the attack.

HIMARS, which launches satellite-guided rockets from mobile launchers, is part of a growing arsenal of sophisticated Western weaponry that helped Ukraine turn the tide of the conflict.

Since the Biden administration began supplying the weapon system in June, HIMARS has been doing just that it greatly increased the Ukrainians’ range and accuracyalready without weapons.

They used it to strike targets far behind the front line, such as the main bridge connecting the city of Kherson to Russian-controlled territory, which contributed to the Russian decision to leave the city.

Last month, a Ukrainian HIMARS attack destroyed a hotel in the town of Kadiivka, Luhansk Region, northeast of Donetsk.

That attack killed members of the Kremlin-aligned Wagner paramilitary group who were using the hotel as a base, according to Ukrainian authorities in the region.

The HIMARS system is most effective when used against stationary targets that can be identified in advance and precisely located, such as ammunition dumps, infrastructure or troop concentrations.

To date, the United States has supplied at least Ukraine 20 Sep HIMARS, manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

Many of the soldiers who suffered casualties appeared to be new recruits, recently mobilized in Putin’s campaign to recruit more men for fighting in Ukraine.

A report by Russian state media said that “active use of cell phones by newly arrived servicemen” had been a major reason for the attack, helping Ukrainian forces locate them.

Throughout the war, Russian soldiers in Ukraine spoke on open telephone lines, often giving away their positions and exposing the disorganization in their ranks.

While the continued use of phones, despite the devastating consequences, reveals a failure of military leadership, military bloggers say this explanation shifts the blame onto the victims.

It doesn’t address why Russian commanders housed so many recruits in an unsecured building within range of US-made rockets.

“No one assumes responsibility of needless deaths,” blogger Anastasia Kashevarova wrote on Telegram.

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