Defeated Putin Troops Flee Ukrainian Advance, Moscow Tries to Spin It Around

(Social media photo shows Ukrainian fighters at the entrance of Izyum, from where the Russians managed to flee in advance.)

Defeated Russian troops fled from a rapid Ukrainian advance in east Ukraine.

This marked a key turning point in Moscow tyrant Vladimir Putin’s failed war. Now, the Putin regime is ludicrously trying to spin it around as some planned maneuver to abandon part of its conquest to focus on other parts.

Russians on the Run

Earlier this week, a surprise Ukrainian offensive liberated the towns of Batakliya and Kupyansk. Then, the Russian command hastily abandoned Izyum, which was its regional command center, into a hasty retreat.

The hasty run was apparently to avoid the encirclement of about 10,000 troops. This would have been an even more humiliating development for Putin.

While everybody expected Ukraine to crumble, Ukraine’s military, leadership, and generation population’s sheer iron will to resist defied Putin’s plans for restoring the Soviet Union.

(Map by The Daily Mails shows the newly liberated 1,000 square miles of territory.)

‘Showing Their Backs’

Speaking on Saturday, Igor Konashenkov, the spokesman of the Russian Defense Ministry, shamelessly declared Putin’s forces are going to be “regrouped.”

He said they’ll be pulled out from Balakliya and Izyum in Eastern Ukraine and sent to fight Ukrainians in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region in Southeast Ukraine.

By the time Konashenkov spoke, Russians had already been routed by the Ukrainians in Balakliya and Kupyansk. They were already fleeing from Izyum in fear of the Ukrainian advance.

Kupyansk, a town of 30,000 people before the war, was the most important railway hub for the Russians in Eastern Ukraine.

It was what they used for supplying their forces further south. Izyum, a town of 50,000, was the seat of their entire command of the occupied territories in the Kharkiv region and all of Eastern Ukraine.

The explanation the Russian Ministry of Defense offered for the humiliating run of the Russians from Izyum is basically the same as the one it came up with at the end of March.

This is when the entire northern front was defeated by Ukrainians in the battle for their capital Kyiv; all surviving Russian forces were pulled out in haste.

According to the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank based in Washington, DC, over the past couple of days, the Ukrainian defenders managed to liberate about 1,000 square miles of territory in the Kharkiv region.

To top it all off, the Ukrainian advance was so quick and surprising that the fleeing Russians left behind hundreds of units of military equipment and entire depots of the respective ammunition.

Speaking in a video address to the nation on Saturday night, Ukraine’s heroic President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the fleeing Russians made a “good decision” to run away.

He also declared the Russian military has shown the best it could, namely “showing its back.”

This article appeared in MorningPress and has been published here with permission.

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