As retaliation for a recent deadly attack on its troops, Russia claimed on Sunday that it had launched a catastrophic “retaliatory strike” in eastern Ukraine. Kyiv swiftly refuted this assertion.
“More than 600 Ukrainian servicemen were killed” by a missile strike on troops stationed in two buildings used as barracks in Kramatorsk, said a Russian defence ministry statement.
Following Ukraine’s New Year’s Eve missile barrage in the eastern Ukrainian town of Makiivka, which Moscow claimed resulted in the deaths of 89 of its soldiers, Russia branded the action as a “retaliatory strike.”
The Kramatorsk strike was not what Russia claimed, according to Ukraine’s armed forces.
According to Sergiy Cherevaty, spokesman for the eastern division of the Ukrainian armed forces, “this information is as real as the fact that they have destroyed all of our HIMARS.”
Ukraine employed HIMARS missiles supplied by the US in the attack on Makiivka. Cherevaty claimed that Russia was unable to carry out highly precise strikes.
Only that Russian intelligence had “during the previous 24 hours” found more than 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers in two buildings in Kramatorsk was said in the Russian statement, which did not specify when the strike had actually occurred.
Russian missile assaults on the industrial city in the eastern Donetsk region have occurred often.
