A deadly strike against Russians in Ukraine reveals Moscow's military failures.

In one of their deadliest attacks to date against Russian forces, the Ukrainians used American-made rockets to kill dozens - and possibly hundreds - of Moscow soldiers in a New Year's Day strike from behind the lines, prompting outraged Russian war hawks to accuse their army of murderous incompetence.

The strike of HIMARS rockets killed 63 Russian soldiers in a building that housed them in the occupied town of Makiivka, eastern Ukraine , the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday - an unusual admission for an army that has often refused to acknowledge heavy casualties. A former Russian paramilitary commander in Ukraine, Igor Girkin, wrote on the Telegram app that "several hundred" were dead and injured and many "remain under rubble".

VideoVideo footage shows the aftermath of a Ukrainian missile attack on Russian forces.CreditCredit...Reuters< /figure>

Ukrainian military officials said it appeared "about 400" Russian soldiers were killed, although they did not explicitly say Kyiv was behind it attack.

None of the claims could be independently verified, but even the lowest number would represent one of the worst Russian casualties in a single episode of the war, and an embarrassment for President Vladimir V Putin. He has repeatedly vowed to correct the mistakes and glaring weaknesses of his armed forces that the war has exposed, and in a New Year's address filmed at a military base, Mr Putin told the families of soldiers killed in the fighting "I share your pain with all my heart.

Russian pro-war bloggers and some government officials said the debacle was caused by the military's own repeated and costly mistakes, such as setting up garrison of troops in a dense concentration within range of Ukrainian artillery, placing them in the same building as an ammunition depot and allowing them to use cell phones, the signals of which can be used by the Ukrainians to focus on their target.

Some pro-war lawmakers demanded an investigation, and one of them, Sergei Mironov, leader of a pro-Kremlin party in parliament, called for the prosecution of all officials responsible, “whether they wear shoulder pads or not.”