"Give me a gun - and I will gladly shoot Putin"

The Sunday Times published a report on the evacuation of residents of the Donetsk region due to the advance of the Russian army on Pokrovsk-an important logistic node of the Armed Forces

The British newspaper The Sunday Times published a report on the advance of the Russian army on Pokrovsk, Donetsk region. This city is considered the most important logistics node of the Armed Forces in the central part of Donbass - and one of the main goals of the Russian Federation in this direction. Journalists talked with Ukrainian military and local residents forced to evacuate from Pokrovsk and neighboring settlements. Medusa retells this report.

88-year-old Maria Pryazhnikova, who was forcibly evacuated from Mirnograd in the Pokrovsky district of the Donetsk region, told reporters The Sunday Times that she had to transfer a grueling 20-hour trip to Ukraine in a stuffy car with a dozen other refugees, their children and domestic animals. “I would prefer to sit in my basement,” she complained.

On Friday, August 23, Pryazhnikova, among another 257 refugees from eastern Ukraine, arrived in the city of Rivne, located more than 800 kilometers west of their house. “Give me a gun, and I will gladly shoot Putin,” she said, going on a platform in an unfamiliar city and sitting in a wheelchair. - Damn Russians! "

Pryazhnikova said that she had to experience evacuation in childhood. In 1941, at the age of five, she was taken by train from Leningrad at the beginning of the blockade of the city. “At that time, we were put in a cattle car,” said a resident of Mirnograd.

35-year-old Katerina Gilentovskaya, another refugee who arrived in Rivne, said that she decided to leave her house near Pokrovsky along with the seven-year-old daughter Angelina, when her friend was wounded by fragments along the way from work. “She had to amputate her leg - she has three young children,” said Gilentovskaya. “We stayed there as much as we could, but I wanted my daughter to be safe.”

42-year-old Svetlana Lastovchenko, who left her house in Mirnograd with his family, realized that we had to leave when, as a result of Russian shelling, an apartment building on a neighboring street was damaged. “This happened in broad daylight, for no reason. I saw the glass scattered, I heard the screams of people. Two days later, the bodies of two people, an elderly couple, took out from under the rubble. There were many wounded, ”she recalls.

The Russian Army on Pokrovsk is gaining momentum and in the coming days the stream of refugees from the Donetsk region will only increase, writes The Sunday Times. On August 19, local authorities announced a mandatory evacuation from Pokrovsk families with children. The head of the Pokrovsky city military administration, Sergei Dobryak, said that 500-600 inhabitants are leaving from the city where 53 thousand people still lived every day. According to him, the inhabitants of Pokrovsk have one or two weeks for evacuation.

In conversations with British journalists, the Ukrainian military tried to explain the “obvious collapse” of defense in the Pokrovsk region. Some consider the cause of the crisis in this direction the lack of artillery shells among the Armed Forces, others explained the current situation with the new Russian tactics related to the use of corrected aviation bombs and electronic warfare. At the same time, all the Sunday Times surveyed by the military Armed Forces agreed that one of the biggest problems they face was a significant superiority of the Russian Federation in number.

“The situation is difficult, we lose their positions, the enemy pushes us. People are tired. We need fresh. No matter how well our fighters are trained, the Russians still manage to suppress us with their number. It is impossible to hold the front line when you are only two or three, and from 10 to 20 people step on you, ”the captain from the 47th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Dzvenislav Rymar told the newspaper.

According to her, the offensive of Ukraine in the Kursk region, which is believed to be designed to distract Russian forces from the Donbass, had no influence on the Pokrovsky section of the front. According to The Sunday Times, Pokrovsk can become the largest settlement, which the troops of the Russian Federation will capture from May 2023, when they managed to take control of the Bakhmut.

The 36-year-old Lieutenant Mikhail Luzhetsky from the 109th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who is fighting near Pokrovsky, told reporters about the “scored-typical atmosphere” in the city. “We hope that everything will be in order, but we understand that the situation is not very good,” the military shared. He claims that despite the situation in the Pokrovsky direction, the operation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kursk region “significantly raised the spirit” of both Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. “Here, in the east, we envy: while they [other Ukrainian units] move and advance in the Kursk region, we are stuck in the trenches, as in the First World War,” added Luzhetsky.

Another warning military Armed Forces in the Pokrovsky direction, with whom the journalists of The Sunday Times spoke, the captain of the 110th mechanized brigade Ivan Sekach believes that Vladimir Putin “is ready to sacrifice Kursk” so as not to lose the pace of the offensive of Russian troops in the Donetsk region. According to him, this is the only section of the front where the Russian army is successfully advancing.

The Ukrainian soldier believes that Russian soldiers will eventually "bomb Pokrovsk to the ground." According to Sekach, the offensive of the Russian troops may slow down in the fall: “When the leaves will begin to fall and it rains, they will get bogged down [because of the thaw]. We just need to hold out to this time. ”