Ukrainian officials claimed “hundreds” of Russian soldiers were killed in a New Year’s Eve missile attack.
Summary
Ukrainian officials claimed “hundreds” of Russian soldiers were killed in a New Year’s Eve missile attack. If confirmed, the attack would represent Russia’s single biggest loss of life since the beginning of the invasion last February.
- Russia’s defense ministry acknowledged 63 Russian soldiers had been killed in the attack, but neither sides’ estimates have been independently confirmed.
- The missile strike destroyed a temporary barracks in a former vocational college in Makiivka, a city in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.
- The attack on the Russian barracks follows days of deadly airstrikes on Ukrainian cities targeting Ukraine’s energy sector and electricity infrastructure. Several people were killed in missile attacks on several civilian areas in Ukraine’s west.
- The New York Times covered how the Russo-Ukraine War is worsening starvation worldwide. Russian blockades and attacks on energy infrastructures have disrupted Ukrainian wheat exports, and the number of people at risk of “acute food insecurity” has doubled to more than 345 million.
- The Guardian reported photos of the destroyed building are circulating on social media, and even Russian pro-war media personalities are claiming the number of deaths is far higher than what the Russian defense ministry has acknowledged so far.
- Putin has grown “increasingly isolated” from much of the Russian elite, the Washington Post reports. After 300 days of war, the country’s most powerful citizens are beginning to question his tactics and some urged him to escalate the conflict even more.
- The Telegraph reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed the school with the US-made Himars multiple-rocket system, a powerful weapons system that has “changed the course of the war.”
- The Wall Street Journal reported that Russian forces also used the school as an ammunition dump, which were ignited by the strike with four “high-explosive warheads.”
- The Washington Examiner covered the latest casualties estimates from Ukrainian officials, who claim to have killed 400 Russian conscripts and injured 300 more in the attack.
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
