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Russia's military command is under pressure as more details emerge of the Ukrainian attack on a Russian base in Makiivka on New Year's Eve, which reportedly resulted in the deaths of some 400 invading soldiers, according to Kyiv. Although Moscow has given a much lower figure and has already tried to blame regional leaders for the incident, the UK defence ministry's intelligence service revealed on Wednesday the Russian error that would have magnified the number of casualties. In its daily report on the Ukraine war, the British believe that "there is a realistic possibility that ammunition was stored near troop accommodations, which detonated during the attack creating secondary explosions." In other words, the attack was made more deadly by a planning error at the military base.

Russia now acknowledges 89 dead in the attack

According to the same British intelligence report, Ukraine shelled a school building in the Russian town of Makiivka, near the city of Donetsk, which they are "almost certain" was being used for military purposes. The base was also a dozen kilometres from "one of the most intensely contested areas of the conflict". The explanations given by the Russian Ministry of Defence are contradictory, and the death toll from the attack is now said to have risen to 89. The British ministry, however, says that "given the scale of the damage" caused by the precision strike, the likelihood that a mistake by the Russians made the situation worse is very high. "The Russian military has a history of stockpiling unsafe ammunition long before the current war, but this incident highlights how unprofessional practices contribute to Russia's high casualty rate," say the British.

Uneasiness with Putin

For the first time, Russian politicians have spoken out against Russian President Vladimir Putin's management of the Ukraine war. What set off the alarm bells was the fiasco the Russian army suffered on New Year's Eve, when the Ukrainian army attacked the Makiivka barracks in occupied Donetsk, reportedly killing 400 people and wounding some 300 more, all of them Russian soldiers. Senator and former deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin has publicly called for an internal investigation to determine what went wrong. And MP Sergei Mironov has accused officials of being responsible for the disaster for ordering the soldiers to be housed in an insufficiently protected building.