Moscow said its ‘retaliatory strike’ killed more than 600 soldiers but Kiev said its armed forces were not affected.
Russia claims its military has carried out a deadly “retaliatory attack” on a barracks used by Ukrainian troops in the Donbas region, while Ukraine denies there were any casualties in the attack.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the missile hit two temporary bases housing 1,300 Ukrainian troops in Kramatorsk, in the eastern region of Donetsk. It said “more than 600 Ukrainian servicemen were killed” as a result of what it called a “retaliatory attack” on Ukrainian soldiers.
Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the air strike was conducted in retaliation after Ukraine killed Dozens of Russian soldiers in an attack on Makiivka last week.
Ukrainian officials deny there were any casualties in the Russian attack on Kramatorsk.
Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, said that Russia’s attacks on Kramatorsk only damaged civilian infrastructure.
“Ukraine’s armed forces are not affected,” he added.
The head of the Donetsk regional government, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said earlier on Sunday that the Russians had carried out seven missile attacks on Kramatorsk, adding that “an educational institution, an institution industry and a garage cooperative” were damaged and there were no casualties.
Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksandr Honcharenko said two school buildings and eight apartment buildings had been damaged.
Reuters news agency reporters visited two university dormitories that the Russian Defense Ministry said were temporary residences of Ukrainian servicemen near the front lines at the time of the overnight attack.
Both did not appear to have been directly hit by the missile or severely damaged, they said. There was no obvious sign that the soldiers had lived there, and there were no signs of bodies or traces of blood.
Attack in Makiivka
At dawn on January 1, Ukrainian forces launched missiles at a facility where Russian troops were stationed in Makiivka, Donetsk.
At least 89 Russian soldiers were killed in one of the bloodiest attacks on Moscow’s forces since the war began on February 24, 2022.
Also on Sunday, the Ukrainian military announced that it had attacked the dormitory of a medical university in Rubizhne, a town in the Russian-occupied eastern Luhansk region, killing 14 Russian soldiers there. The number of people injured is unknown, it said.
Elsewhere in the east, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said one person was killed in air strikes on Bakhmut and eight others were injured.
Governor Oleh Syniehubov said that in the northeast Kharkiv region, the town of Merefa was attacked overnight, leaving one person dead and two other settlements in the area under shelling.
The development comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a 36-hour ceasefire to mark Christmas for Orthodox Christians, who celebrate the holiday on January 7. ends at 11pm in Kiev (21:00 GMT) on Saturday.
