Russia has suffered some of the heaviest military losses in a single battle since the start of the war after elite units repeatedly tried to storm a fortified coal mining town in broad daylight.
Ukrainian officials claim huge numbers of enemy troops have been killed, wounded and captured in failed attempts to seize the Donetsk hamlet of Vuhledar.
They say that one marine brigade of 5,000 men was almost entirely destroyed, for the third time since the Kremlin launched the full-scale invasion nearly a year ago.
The carnage – and loss of at least 130 armoured vehicles – led Russian hardliners to call for public show trials to punish incompetent generals responsible for the repeated battlefield massacres of their soldiers.
‘Some of them are complete cretins – all the mistakes that were made before were repeated,’ said Igor Girkin, a Russian former intelligence officer who helped stage the pro-Moscow 2014 insurgencies in Donetsk and Crimea. Girkin complained that Russian soldiers…
