the turn of the year, the ammunition stored and the HIMARS missiles

The figures dancebut the message matches: what happened in the town Makiivka it has been a massacre. On Saturday night, as the clock ticked down to ring in the new year, Ukrainian forces launched one of the deadliest attacks on the Russian army since the start of the invasion. At least 400 soldiers died and another 300 were injured, according to the data handled by kyiv.

For its part, the Russian Defense Ministry has only acknowledged the death of 63 of his men, who were in a school that served as a provisional military base in the area. However, Daniel BezsonovRussian spokesman for the government of Donetsk, in the Donbass region, described the offensive as “massive coup” with missiles precision HIMARS and hinted that the Russian commanders had made mistakes. “The enemy inflicted heavy defeats on us in this war not because of his coldness and talent, but because of our mistakes,” he wrote in a Telegram post.

[Decenas de soldados rusos muertos al impactar un misil ucraniano en la base de Makíivka en el Donbás]

Russian military veteran and former FSB officer who participated in the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Igor Guirkin, He has not hesitated to detail those errors. “The vocational school where the new recruits were has been almost completely destroyed because the ammunition stored in the same building detonated in the attack,” he denounced through social networks.

Nor has he hesitated to confirm the severity of the disaster by assuring that they had “many hundreds” dead and that “much others” They remained buried under rubble.

In his opinion, if the Ukrainian attack it has been so lethal is due to the imprudence of the Russian army that would have kept the ammunition “without the slightest camouflage”. An oversight, to call it somehow, that has already been committed before and has allowed the Ukrainian army to destroy numerous enemy military warehouses throughout the war.

reckless conversations

That is not, however, his worst mistake. According to Guirkin, a staunch defender of the “special military operation” Initiated by Vladimir Putin more than 300 days ago, the main problem has been that the Russian forces concentrated a large number of personnel and weapons in an area that is within the range of the HIMARS missiles sent by the United States that can hit 80 kilometers away. And it is that, Makiivka is just ten kilometers from the front line.

But in order to attack, the Ukrainians first they had to locate their target. To this, apparently, they have been helped by the Russian soldiers themselves, who, for the most part, had been recently mobilized and had little preparation.

[¿Ganará Ucrania la guerra? Los cuatro escenarios que podemos esperar para 2023]

In fact, a report published in the Russian state media notes that “the active use of mobile phones by the newly arrived military” had been one of the main reasons for the attackas he had helped Ukrainian forces identify their location.

This lack of prudence was previously uncovered by the New York Timeswhich revealed that they unconsciously used their personal mobile phones to call their relatives or to make decisions about their future movements, revealing their positions and allowing Ukrainian forces to track them.