Eighteen of the officers died on the day of the strike and two later from their wounds, according to Mediazona and BBC Russian. The outlets said they reconstructed the list by cross-checking personnel records against a registry of inheritance cases and reviewing obituaries of senior officers published over the past month.
The officers served at the headquarters of the Center group of forces — at the headquarters of the Central Military District and the headquarters of the 41st Combined Arms Army.
Among them were colonels, lieutenant colonels and majors responsible for reconnaissance, air defense, artillery, engineering troops and electronic warfare. According to Mediazona, this is the largest single simultaneous loss of Russian officers since the start of the war.
On August 26, Denis Pushilin, the head of the occupation administration in Donetsk, said Ukrainian forces struck the area of the Donetsk City shopping center with Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG missiles. He reported eight wounded civilians but did not mention military casualties. An Izvestia correspondent at the scene wrote of ten dead; the publication was later deleted.
The Ukrainian OSINT project Exile+ suggested the targets were two facilities used by the Russian military as command posts: one attack destroyed a building on Ilyicha Avenue, and another hit the underground parking lot of an unfinished residential complex. The KiberBoroschno project claimed six missiles were fired at the underground parking lot.
Since the start of the war, journalists have established the deaths of 276,113 Russian military personnel, of whom more than 7,800 were officers of the Russian army and other security agencies, according to estimates by independent researchers. The researchers themselves note that actual losses may be higher: by expert assessment, their data cover between 45% and 65% of the real death toll. Russian authorities do not publish official casualty statistics.
Accounts differ: Pushilin reported only eight wounded civilians and did not mention military deaths; Izvestia wrote of ten dead and then deleted the post; Mediazona and BBC Russian identified the names of 20 killed officers.