Moscow says Ukrainian rocket strike kills 63 Russian troops

Ukrainian forces fired rockets at a facility in the eastern Donetsk region where Russian soldiers were stationed, killing 63 of them, Russia’s defence ministry said on Monday, in one of the deadliest attacks on the Kremlin’s forces since the war began more than 10 months ago.

Ukrainian forces fired six rockets from a HIMARS launch system and two of them were shot down, a defence ministry statement said. It did not say when the strike happened.

The strike, using a US-supplied precision weapon that has proven critical in enabling Ukrainian forces to hit key targets, delivered a new setback for Russia which in recent months has reeled from a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The Ukrainian military has not directly confirmed the strike, but seemed to acknowledge what appeared to be the same attack that Russian authorities reported.

The Strategic Communications Directorate of Ukraine’s Armed Forces claimed on Sunday that some 400 mobilised Russian soldiers were killed in a vocational school building in Makiivka and about 300 more were wounded. That claim could not be independently verified. The Russian statement said the strike occurred “in the area of Makiivka” and didn’t mention the vocational school.

Meanwhile, Russia deployed multiple exploding drones in another night-time attack on Ukraine, officials said Monday, as the Kremlin signalled no letup in its strategy of using bombardments to target the country’s energy infrastructure and wear down Ukrainian resistance.

The barrage was the latest in a series of relentless year-end attacks, including one that killed three civilians on New Year's Eve.

On Monday, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that 40 drones “headed for Kyiv” overnight. All of them were destroyed, according to air defence forces.

Klitschko said 22 drones were destroyed over Kyiv, three in the outlying Kyiv region and 15 over neighbouring provinces.

Energy infrastructure facilities were damaged as the result of the attack and an explosion occurred in one city district, the mayor said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether that was caused by drones or other munitions. A wounded 19-year-old man was hospitalised, Klitschko added, and emergency power outages were underway in the capital.

In the outlying Kyiv region a “critical infrastructure object” and residential buildings were hit, Gov. Oleksiy Kuleba said.

Russia has carried out airstrikes on Ukrainian power and water supplies almost weekly since October.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of “energy terrorism” as the aerial bombardments have left many people without heat amid freezing temperatures. Ukrainian officials say Moscow is “weaponizing winter” in its effort to demoralize the Ukrainian resistance.

Ukraine is using sophisticated Western-supplied weapons to help shoot down Russia’s missiles and drones, as well as send artillery fire into Russian-held areas of the country.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his New Year's address to the nation that 2022 was “a year of difficult, necessary decisions.”

Putin insists he had no choice but to send troops into Ukraine because it threatened Russia’s security — an assertion condemned by the West, which says Moscow bears full responsibility for the war.

In Russia, a Ukrainian drone hit an energy facility in the Bryansk region that borders with Ukraine, Bryansk regional governor Alexander Bogomaz reported on Monday morning. A village was left without power as a result, he said.