Around midnight on New Year’s Eve, a barrage of US-made Himars missiles crashed into a building full of Russian recruits in Makiivka, outside Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine busy
The Vocational Technical School was not a well-chosen sanctuary: it even stood out in commercial satellite imagery as the most prominent building for miles around. Despite this, the Russian commanders had filled it with recruits and apparently stored ammunition in the basement. They never had a chance.
The Kremlin has acknowledged that 89 servicemen were killed and blamed its own soldiers’ use of mobile phones to give away their locations. Other estimates, from the Ukrainian armed forces and Russian military social media, put the death toll in the hundreds.
For many ordinary Russians, the