Ukraine reveals 87 killed in strike on barracks last week
Kyiv revealed its worst military losses from a single attack of the Ukraine war yesterday, saying 87 people had been killed last week when Russian forces struck a barracks housing troops at a training base in the north.
The disclosure that scores had been killed in the attack demonstrated Russia’s ability to inflict huge losses, even far from the front.
Previously, Kyiv had said eight people died in the May 17 strike on the barracks in the town of Desna.
“Today we completed work at Desna. In Desna, under the rubble, there were 87 casualties,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a speech by video link to business leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
Moscow had said at the time it hit a training base with long-range missiles.
The toll Zelensky announced yesterday was more than double the number killed in a similar attack on a Ukrainian training base in Yaraviv in the West in March.
“History is at a turning point... This is really the moment when it is decided whether brute force will rule the world,” Zelensky said in his address, calling for maximum economic sanctions on Russia.
In the latest fighting, Kyiv said it had held off a Russian assault on Sievierodonetsk, an eastern city that has become the main target of Moscow’s offensive since it seized Mariupol last week.
Russian forces tried to storm Sievierodonetsk but were unsuccessful and retreated, Zelensky’s office said. Moscow has been pushing to overrun the city as it tries to encircle Ukrainian forces, and fully capture Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, the Donbas region it say on behalf of separatists.
In Kyiv, a court in the conflict’s first war crimes trial handed down a life prison sentence on a Russian tank commander who had pleaded guilty to killing shooting a 62year-old Ukrainian civilian dead on the invasion’s fourth day.
The soldier, Vadim Shishimarin, 21, watched silently from a reinforced glass box and showed no emotion as the verdict was read out.
The Kremlin had complained it could not help defend him in court.
In Mariupol, Russian mine clearing teams were combing through the ruins of the giant Azovstal steel plant. Ukraine has been trying to secure a prisoner swap for fighters who surrendered last week.
The full capture of Mariupol last week gave Russia its biggest victory for months.
Its forces now control a largely unbroken swathe of the east and south, freeing up more troops to join the main Donbas fight.
In recent days it has launched a series of assaults to capture Sievierodonetsk, the easternmost part of a Ukrainian-held pocket of the Donbas and one of the last parts of Luhansk province still outside Russia’s grip.
Luhansk governor Serhiy Gaidai said Russia was “wiping Sievierodonetsk from the face of the earth”, trying to advance from three directions: To overrun Sievierodonetsk, cut off a highway south of it and cross the river further west.
Britain’s ministry of defence said Moscow had probably endured losses in three months in Ukraine on par with its losses over nine years in Afghanistan in the 1980s.