Russian attack convoy destroyed in precise air strike

The Ukrainian military has released a video allegedly showing its forces destroying a Russian attack convoy in a targeted airstrike.

“Another failed Russian attack,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said on Monday on X (formerly Twitter), releasing footage of the attack filmed by Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Infantry Brigade.

Yuriy Mysiagin, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and deputy of the Ukrainian VRU Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, said the footage showed the destruction of an assault column carrying Russian military equipment in the town of Krasnohorivka in the eastern Ukrainian Donetsk region.

The video shows the moment Ukrainian forces attack a Russian target, causing an explosion and raising a huge column into the air upon impact. Newsweek could not independently verify when and where the recordings were made and has asked the Russian Defense Ministry for comment by email.

The Donetsk and Luhansk regions make up Ukraine’s Donbass. The Kremlin has been pushing for the complete conquest of the regions since the first Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Russia and Ukraine are suffering significant losses of troops and equipment as fighting intensifies in eastern Ukraine. Kyiv, like Moscow, rarely provides updated information on its war casualties. A US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment leaked in April 2023 – just over a year after the war began – said Ukraine had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, including 15,500 to 17,500 dead.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which publishes figures on Russia’s troop and equipment losses as part of its daily war report, said Russia had lost 46 artillery systems in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 16,056.

In its latest update on Tuesday, the Ukrainian military said Russia had lost 1,060 soldiers in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 577,060.

Moscow has also lost a total of 16,141 armored combat vehicles, 8,381 tanks, 21,687 vehicles and fuel tanks, 906 air defense systems, 363 military jets, 326 helicopters and 28 warships in the ongoing war, the Kiev military said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said in its latest update on Monday that its military has so far destroyed 631 Ukrainian aircraft, 278 helicopters, 28,647 unmanned aerial vehicles, 556 anti-aircraft missile systems, 16,714 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 1,392 combat vehicles with multiple rocket launchers, 12,535 field artillery pieces and mortars, and 24,178 units of special military vehicles.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia regularly publish detailed casualty figures or update their equipment losses. Newsweek has not independently verified these figures.

The Institute for the Study of War, an independent US-based think tank, said in an analysis of the conflict in Ukraine on Monday that Russian troops were reportedly approaching the outskirts of Khasiv Yar in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, “but are unlikely to threaten the settlement with encirclement or occupation in the coming months.”

Its capture would bring Russian forces “limited but not insignificant operational advantages if they succeeded,” the think tank added.

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