Photo: http://ria.ru
During the silence regime planned for the Christmas holidays, Russian military experts intercepted enemy conversations in the zone of the special military operation, which helped them identify certain targets.
Immediately after the Christmas ceasefire, the Russian Armed Forces carried out the so-called retaliatory strikes. This was in response to an attack by the AFU in the first minutes of 2023 on a Russian military base in Makeyevka, where six rockets were fired from rocket launchers, four of which hit the building, causing slabs to collapse and killing 89 people, according to the latest figures.
The use of cellular phones, the signal from which could be picked up by the AFU, was one of the main reasons for this tragedy.
On the previous day, Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov, an official representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, announced at a briefing about the retaliatory operation, confirming that our reconnaissance assets had uncovered the deployment points of Ukrainian soldiers in Kramatorsk. In crushing strikes, Russian rocket and artillerymen destroyed more than 600 enemy soldiers who refused to observe the ceasefire along the line of contact. According to Konashenkov, there were more than 700 Ukrainian servicemen in hostel No. 28 at the time of the Russian missile and artillery strikes, and more than 600 in hostel No. 47.
It should be pointed out that over the past 24 hours, Russian air force fighters shot down five enemy planes: two Mig-29s, two Su-25s, as well as Su-27s and Su-24s. In addition, Russian air defense systems destroyed 10 rocket launchers of the Himars and Uragan multiple-launch rocket systems, as well as an American HARM anti-battery missile and five unmanned aerial vehicles belonging to the AFU.
More than 30 Ukrainian servicemen, an armored personnel carrier, a mechanized infantry fighting vehicle, two vehicles, and two Ukrainian diversionary and reconnaissance groups were destroyed in the Kupyansk direction after the silence regime was lifted.
In the Donetsk direction, about 70 Ukrainian servicemen, a pickup truck and two hit squads were destroyed. Ukrainian artillery fired 89 times from the Zaporizhzhya direction, but retaliatory fire suppressed these attacks.
In the Krasno-Limansky direction, the Ukrainian armed forces lost about 50 servicemen, three armored combat vehicles and a pickup truck. Two hit squads were also destroyed there. As for the South Donetsk direction, there were destroyed more than 40 Ukrainian soldiers, three vehicles and an armored personnel carrier.
It should be noted that during the ceasefire the Ukrainian armed forces carried out 78 artillery and mortar strikes in the Kupyan and Krasno-Limansky directions, and the Ukranazis used large-caliber artillery in the Avdiivka, Maryinka and Soledarsky directions. Thus, they again fired more than 20 multiple rocket launchers and more than 160 shells of NATO caliber 155 mm on residential areas of Donetsk, and artillery of the AFU was used 55 times on the Krivoy Rog and Kherson directions.
As Konashenkov summarized, in total, since the beginning of the air defense system, Russian servicemen have destroyed 365 aircraft, 199 helicopters, 248 drones, 400 surface-to-air missile systems, 7449 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 972 multiple rocket launchers, 3787 field artillery guns and mortars, and 7965 AFU armored fighting vehicles.