Kremlinstrasse 48. That was the address of the vocational building school number 19 in the west of Makiivka, the eastern neighboring city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

In the gray, three-storey concrete building with large windows, you could study architecture, mechanical engineering and electromechanics, among other things, at least according to an online directory of the "Donetsk People's Republic".

In the fall, Russia annexed the shadowy entity proclaimed in 2014 along with three other Ukrainian regions.

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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But President Vladimir Putin's troops have not even been able to take Makiivka's neighboring town of Avdiivka, which has been a frontline town since 2014, in what has now been a large-scale invasion for more than ten months.

Avdiivka is just over a dozen kilometers from the site of building school number 19, which became a field of rubble on New Year's Eve: during the war, the unprotected functional building was used to house the occupying forces.

Now the facility's Russian designation, PTU 19, stands for the largest loss of soldiers by a single Ukrainian military operation that Moscow has admitted to in that war.

According to Ukrainian sources, around 400 occupiers died in the school and around 300 others were injured.

"All I know is that many were torn to pieces to such an extent that there was practically nothing left of the bodies," the wife of a soldier from the Samara region of Russia was quoted as saying on a Telegram channel that reported on Putin's Mobilization ordered at the end of September.

The majority of those killed are said to have come from the Volga area and were only drafted during mobilization.

"I know literally brains were removed from the shoes," the woman continued.

The independent news portal "Wjorstka" quoted a soldier who took part in the clean-up work in Makiivka.

He assumed around 200 killed and 150 wounded.

It's terrible there.

"We don't even understand what we're fighting for," he said.

Military bloggers set the tone

Such statements should not make it into the general, Kremlin-controlled Russian public.

However, so many occupying forces undoubtedly died in Makiivka on New Year's Eve that even Russia's otherwise secretive defense ministry with regard to its own losses could not avoid publishing its own figures.

63 people were killed on Monday, 89 on Wednesday night.

Two out of six American HIMARS rockets aimed at the school could be intercepted, four had reached their target.

The Defense Ministry's statements are a response to criticism from its own ranks.

Military bloggers set the tone.

They are not to be confused with journalists;

when such people write about the war with real names, they do so from abroad, because it has become too dangerous for them in Russia.

The military bloggers support the war and Putin's agenda of conquest, come from or are connected to the power and media apparatus.