In a statement Sunday, the Ukrainian military’s general staff said that Russian forces had abandoned the town of Svatove in Luhansk region, a town that until Saturday was still 40 kilometers (25 miles) beyond the known front line of the Ukrainian advance.
Svatove has been an important hub on Russian resupply routes to the front lines further south — along the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“The occupiers have abandoned Svatove in Luhansk region,” the general staff’s office said in a Facebook post. “They rushed away in four Kamaz trucks, twenty Tigr AVs [armored vehicles] and stole over 20 cars of local residents.”
CNN cannot independently verify the Ukrainian account.
The general staff’s office also claimed that “as a result of the successful counteroffensive of our troops in the Kharkiv direction, the Russian troops frantically leave their positions and flee with the loot deep into the temporarily occupied territories or into the territory of the Russian Federation.”
It referred to one alleged episode in which, it said “150 service members of the armed forces of the Russian Federation left in a convoy from Borshchova and Artemivka of the Kharkiv region on two buses, one truck and 19 stolen cars.”
Borshchova is to the north of Kharkiv city, just a few kilometers from Ukraine’s border with Russia.
Source: www.cnn.com