Natalya Humenyuk, spokesperson for the Southern operational command of Ukraine’s Armed Forces (AFU) announced on the Kiev24 television channel on Thursday that a training ground on the left bank of the Dnipro River near Kherson had been attacked by the AFU.
She referred to a video that the Ukrainian blogger DeepState had published on Wednesday evening that appeared to show a concentration of Russian troops near the village of Podo-Kalinovka being hit by artillery of some sort.
According to Humenyuk, the strike killed as many as 60 Russian servicemen of the 328th Airborne Assault Regiment, 810th Separate Guards Marine Brigade but would not be drawn on what weapons had been used.
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The BBC confirmed the information on its Russian language Telegram channel citing an officer from Ukraine’s special services operating in the Kherson region. Podo-Kalinovka is located approximately 27 km in a straight line from the AFU left bank bridgehead of Krynky, where fierce fighting has occurred in recent months.
The BBC suggested that the strike was carried out by HIMARS missiles a claim which was also made on several social media sites. There were also suggestions that the Russian troops had been training for a renewed assault on the Krynky bridgehead at the time of the attack.
This is the second attack on a group of Russian troops congregating in the open to be hit in just over 48 hours. On Tuesday, a large number of troops from the 36th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade had assembled on a training ground near Trudivske in the Donetsk region apparently waiting to be addressed by Maj. Gen. Oleg Moiseev, commander of the 29th Army of the Eastern District when they were struck by cluster munitions from three HIMARS missiles, killing 68 soldiers.
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The governor of the Trans-Baikal Territory, from where most of the military personnel involved had originated, said that the claimed number of those killed was greatly exaggerated.
However, on Wednesday posts began appearing on both Telegram and X (formerly Twitter) with images of a clipboard holding a list of the dead, which the independent news site Important Stories says it had verified with a source from a unit involved. The list includes a list of 68 casualties, 65 by name and three listed as not known.
In June around 100 members of the 20th Combined Arms Army were killed when the missiles hit a gathering which, according to Russian milbloggers, had been waiting for two hours to be briefed by their commander, near Kreminna in the Luhansk region.
At the end of July, a large group of Russian soldiers from five separate military units attending a training and rest camp gathered on a beach on Dzharylhach Island in the Black Sea. A HIMARS strike killed as many as 200 troops in a location they thought was beyond Ukraine’s reach.
The site of Tuesday’s Ukrainian attack near Trudivske was a training area that had been used by Kyiv’s troops since the mid-2010s and, after being captured by advancing Russian troops in 2022, continued to be used for the same purpose.
It seems that Russian commanders just don’t learn and are either ignorant or uncaring about the long-range capability of the US HIMARS weapon system.
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