Russia says dozens of its troops killed in attack in eastern Ukraine

Russia acknowledged that dozens of its troops were killed in one of the Ukraine war's deadliest strikes, angering Russian nationalists, including lawmakers, and drawing demands for commanders to be punished for housing soldiers alongside an ammunition dump.

In a rare disclosure, Russia's defence ministry said 63 soldiers had died on New Year's Eve in the fiery blast which destroyed a temporary barracks in a former vocational college in Makiivka, twin city of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

Four rockets fired from US-made HIMARS launchers hit the site, the defence ministry said. It said two rockets had been shot down. Ukraine said the Russian death toll was in the hundreds, though pro-Russian officials called this an exaggeration.

Russian military bloggers said the huge destruction was a result of storing ammunition in the same building as a barracks, despite commanders knowing it was within range of Ukrainian rockets.

Ukraine almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy did not address the Makiivka strike in his nightly speech on Monday.

But the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces on Monday reported the Makiivka attack as "a strike on Russian manpower and military equipment". It did not mention casualties, but said 10 pieces of military equipment were destroyed.

Separately, Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down all 39 drones Russia had launched in a third straight night of air strikes against civilian targets in the capital Kyiv and other cities.

Ukrainian officials said their success proved that Russia's tactic in recent months of raining down missiles and drones to knock out Ukraine's energy infrastructure was increasingly failing as Kyiv beefs up its air defences more than 10 months since Russian forces invaded.