What happened in Makiivka and why are the Russians blaming their own troops?

Just shortly after New Year’s Ukrainian forces targeted a major military Russian base in the small city of Makiivka and scored the deadliest strike since the beginning of the invasion. 

Ukrainian officials didn’t take credit for the strike but the Strategic Communications Department of the Ukrainian military on its Telegram channel estimated that 400 Russian soldiers died in the attack with about 300 more being wounded. 

“Greetings,” the Telegram message read, “as a result of careless handling of heating devices, neglect of security measures, and smoking in an unspecified place, Santa packed about 400 corpses of pig dogs in bags.”

“About 300 more were wounded of varying degrees of severity… it is interesting that all this happened on New Year's Eve,” the post continued. 

Later the official spokesperson for the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Andrii Kovalev clarified the casualty numbers, noting that the “losses of the enemy amounted to about 500 soldiers either wounded and dead."

Russia announced the deadly attack on its Makiivka base on January 4th and noted that the destruction was the result of six missiles fired from the American-made M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. 

In his Telegram comments on the attack, Russian Ministry of Defense official and  Lieutenant General Sergei Sevryukov said that a commission was being set up to investigate the deadly missile strike and that quoted Ukrainian casualties were not accurate. 

Sevryukov claimed that the Russian death toll had only reached 89 servicemen at the time he made the video and blamed his soldier's use of personal cell phones which revealed the base's location to Ukrainian forces. 

"The number of our dead comrades has gone up," Sevryukov said, before adjusting the number of killed servicemen in Makiivka, which the Kremlin had quoted to be only 63 soldiers just days after the strike occurred. 

Journalists from the Kyiv Post noted that the world shouldn’t believe Russia’s low casualty numbers, but also conceded that their admission to 89 deaths did say something important about the strike. 

“The fact the Kremlin has officially acknowledged 89 gives an indication of the seriousness of the scandal unfolding over the strike,” the journalists wrote. 

The Russian Ministry of Defense has attempted to wave off the attack as a one-time lucky strike that was only possible because of the illegal use of personal cell phones in a combat zone. 

"This factor allowed the enemy to locate and determine the co-ordinates of the military personnel for a missile strike," Sevryukov said in his Telegram statement. 

Sevryukov added that the main reason for the attack “was the turning on and massive use by personnel of mobile phones within reach of enemy weapons contrary to the ban,” according to a translation provided by the Guardian.

The Russian government first banned its troops from using personal cell phones while deployed in 2019 but it hasn’t stopped soldiers in Ukraine from using their phones to contact each other.

But blaming cell phone use amongst soldiers seems like a convenient excuse to explain away the death of such a large number of soldiers that shouldn’t have been billeted within range of Ukrainian artillery.