- Elsa Mishmann
- BBC news
Russia said a New Year’s Day rocket attack that killed at least 89 Russian soldiers came because forces used their cell phones.
Officials said the use of the jammed phones allowed the enemy to locate the target. Russia has already launched an investigation.
Ukraine says 400 Russian soldiers were killed and 300 wounded in an attack on a recruiting college in Makevka in occupied Donetsk region.
This is the highest number of deaths Russia has admitted to during the war.
Russia said that at 00:01 local time on New Year’s Day, six US-made HIMARS missiles were fired at a vocational school, two of which were shot down by air defences.
The Defense Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that the regiment’s deputy commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bachurin, was among the dead.
image copyright Reuters
The building was destroyed by missiles.
The statement said an investigative commission has already begun looking into the circumstances of the crash.
But he added that it was “already clear” that the main reason for the attack was the presence and use of cell phones by full-scale forces within Ukrainian weapons range, although this is prohibited.
“This factor allowed the enemy to pinpoint the coordinates of the soldiers’ positions and strike them with a missile attack,” the statement read.
The statement added that officials found guilty in the investigation will be brought to justice and steps are being taken to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
Russia has increased the number of Russian soldiers killed in the attack to 89 – from 63 – although there is no way to verify the number of soldiers killed. It is extremely rare for Moscow to confirm battlefield casualties.
The vocational school was full of recruits at the time, people among the 300,000 soldiers called up in the partial mobilization requested by President Vladimir Putin in September.
There were also reports that munitions were stored near the site, which was reduced to rubble.
Some Russian commentators and politicians have accused the army of incompetence, saying the forces should never have received such poor facilities.
Pavel Gubarev, a former senior Russian authority official in Donetsk, said the decision to house so many soldiers in one building was “criminal negligence”.
“If nobody gets punished for it, it will only get worse,” he warned.
The deputy speaker of the local Moscow parliament, Andrei Medvedev, said the soldiers would be to blame, not the commander, who made the original decision to put so many of them in one place.
President Putin on Tuesday signed a decree to pay 5 million rubles (equivalent to $69,000) to the families of National Guard soldiers killed in the line of duty.
