Moscow is playing a risky blame game in Makiivka

At one minute past midnight on 1 January, as Putin uttered the last words of his new year’s address, Ukraine sent six Himars rockets into the Russian-occupied territory of Donetsk. Four landed on a vocational school in the town of Makiivka, which had been acting as a temporary Russian military base, reducing its buildings to rubble.

The domestic fallout for Russia is proving messy. From the moment they announced news of the strike, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) has made considerable efforts to downplay the death toll and pin the blame for the incident on the dead Russian soldiers themselves. They, the MoD says, are the reason Ukraine knew where to find them.

On 2 January, the MoD said that 63 Russian personnel had been killed in the strike. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army said that in fact nearly 400 soldiers had been killed, and 300 injured.

The true number of soldiers killed is likely to remain unverified, but it is safe to say the initial Russian figure was an underestimate, likely by quite a margin.