After their towns were liberated from Russian occupiers, Ukrainian civilians told soldiers the Russians were dropping their rifles and running away in fear as the Ukrainian military fought to free captured territory, the Washington Post reports.
Just like the junior Republican Senator from Missouri who ran through the halls of Congress to escape a violent mob he encourage just hours before, fearful Russian soldiers are fleeing as their positions were being targeted.
“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko, a resident of the eastern farming village of Zaliznychne said Sunday after investigators looking into claims of Russian war crimes came into town hours after Ukrainian forces liberated the city.
Ukrainian officials say they’ve retaken 3,000 square kilometers (about 1,100 square miles) of territory since the offensive began last week, claiming to have taken more land since Monday than new territory Russia had taken since April. (Their claim, not ours.)
Residents told of Russian soldiers asking to borrow phones to call their mothers. Others said that while the soldiers were not cruel to the people in the Russian-speaking village, the Russians were using a mill in the town to use as a base from which to launch rocket attacks on Ukrainian forces.