(Reuters) – Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Monday that 63 Russian soldiers had been killed in a Ukrainian attack on their quarters in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine’s Donetsk province.
Footage posted online showed a building purported to be a vocational college in the town of Makiivka, twin city of the regional capital Donetsk, reduced to a field of smoldering rubble.
Earlier, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said as many as 400 Russians had been killed.
Daniil Bezsonov, a senior Russian-backed regional official in the Moscow-controlled parts of the Donetsk region, said the vocational college had been hit by U.S.-made HIMARS rockets at around midnight Saturday night.
Russia’s Defense Ministry gave its estimate of the death toll only in the final paragraph of a 528-word daily battlefield roundup.
A source close to the Russian-installed Donetsk leadership told Reuters the building had been used to house some of the 300,000 or more soldiers mobilized since September, many of them already sent to the front to bolster Russia’s faltering military campaign in Ukraine.
Source: Hamodia