RUssland’s Ministry of Defense issued its own statement on the “tragic event”, as Makiivka put it. A report published on Telegram on Wednesday night puts the number of victims of the Ukrainian rocket attack on New Year’s Eve on a vocational school where occupying soldiers were housed at 89.
On Monday there was talk of 63 soldiers killed, but at the very end of one of the usual daily briefings by ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov, who had previously presented a number of reports of destruction. The acknowledgment in itself was remarkable: it is rare for Russia’s military to admit losses of their own. And there have never been so many since the start of the full-scale invasion in late February 2022.
Apparently, Russia’s military believes the impact of the Makiivka strike is potentially so severe that it is trying to limit the damage. This is also supported by the fact that the new statement did not come from Konashenkov, but from Lieutenant General Sergey Sevryukov. At the end of a nearly three-minute speech, the deputy head of the military-political department announced that those responsible would be held accountable. However, he had previously presented his own culprits: the killed soldiers themselves.
Sevryukov does not mention ammunition
“It is already obvious that the main reason for what happened was the illegal, mass use” of mobile phones by the soldiers, Sevryukov said. You have allowed the enemy to determine the location of the affected unit. In addition, Sevryukov named a deputy commander of the unit, Lieutenant Colonel Bachurin, who was among the dead. In Russia it is common to blame bad incidents on lower levels and deaths in order to disguise responsibility.
Not only the Ukrainian military, but also Russian war bloggers place the number of deaths much higher, namely in the three-digit range. A number of bloggers have expressed displeasure that the killed soldiers – who were drafted into the mobilization and are said to have come mainly from the Samara region – were housed in addition to ammunition in the not even particularly protected vocational school. These mistakes explained the high number of casualties. Sevryukov said nothing at all about ammunition in the immediate vicinity of the soldiers; in his version, the impact of four HIMARS rockets alone caused the “reinforced concrete structure” of the vocational school to collapse.
In addition, the thesis of mobile phone use, which had already been launched by a state news agency, seems like a protective claim: The destroyed vocational school was in the greater Donetsk area in a densely populated area, where numerous people are likely to have used mobile phones, especially on New Year’s Eve.
Sevryukov also tried to show that revenge had already been taken for the attack. The Ukrainian armed forces’ multiple rocket launcher used for this purpose was destroyed by “return fire”, he said, listing alleged further successes of the Russian military in which more than 330 “Ukrainian nationalists and foreign mercenaries” were killed.
Already on Tuesday, the military had tried to put this aspect of revenge in the foreground. According to state media, commemorative events for those killed were held in a total of five cities in the Samara region.
The chairman of an official women’s military council spoke in the regional capital of Samara on the Volga. “Neither we nor our men wanted war,” said Ekaterina Kolotovkina, not the survivors or relatives of killed recruits, but the wife of a lieutenant general, Andrei Kolotovkin. “But the whole West has united against us to destroy us, us and our children,” Kolotovkina continued. But “our men” would not allow that. Kolotovkina said she asked her husband “to take revenge” because of the mothers, widows and orphans. “We will not forgive, and victory will definitely be with us.” Apparently, to protect her husband, the general’s wife added that he was not responsible for the regiment to which those killed are said to have belonged.
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