Makiivka: Russia blames missile attack on soldiers' mobile phone use
Russia has said a new year missile attack that killed at least 89 Russian soldiers happened because troops were using mobile phones, defying a ban. Turning on the phones and massive use of them allowed the enemy to locate its target, officials said.
Ukraine says 400 soldiers were killed - and another 300 wounded - in the attack on a college for conscripts in Makiivka, in the occupied Donetsk area. It is the largest number of deaths Russia has acknowledged in the war. Russia said that at 00:01 Moscow time on New Year's Day, six rockets were fired from a US-made Himars rocket system at a vocational college, two of which were shot down. Moments earlier President Vladimir Putin had given his annual new year address on Russian TV.
The deputy commander of the regiment, Lt Col Bachurin, was among those killed, the ministry of defence said in a statement on Wednesday. A commission was investigating the circumstances of the incident, the statement said.
But it was "already obvious" that the main cause of the attack was the use of mobile phones by troops in range of Ukrainian weapons, despite this being banned, it added. "This factor allowed the enemy to locate and determine the co-ordinates of the location of military personnel for a missile strike."
Lt Gen Sergei Sevryukov said officials found responsible by the investigation would be brought to justice and "all the necessary measures are currently being adopted to prevent this kind of tragic incident in the future".
The defence ministry's statement was striking for two reasons.
The military's official death toll is now 89. The previous figure of 63 dead already represented the highest single loss of life Moscow had admitted since the war began. The real death toll in Makiivka could be much higher, as is claimed by both Ukraine and by unofficial Russian sources.
Second, the statement said that "responsible officials" would be brought to justice, suggesting that something went wrong.
Pavel Gubarev, a former leading official in Russia's proxy authority in Donetsk, said the decision to house a large number of soldiers in one building was "criminal negligence". "If no-one is punished for this, then it will only get worse," he warned.
The deputy speaker of Moscow's local parliament, Andrei Medvedev, said it was predictable that the soldiers would be blamed rather than the commander who made the original decision to put so many of them in one place.
In November, Russia withdrew from the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, a major strategic defeat for Moscow. The announcement to retreat, though, was made by Gen Sergei Surovikin, commander of Russian forces in Ukraine. President Putin was meanwhile pictured touring a neurological facility, and did not make any comment on the situation in Kherson.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Tuesday night that Moscow was "on the eve of new mobilisation processes".