They were thrown to the front line like cannon fodder.
near Makiivka in the Svativ district of the Luhansk region, one of the surviving servicemen, Oleksiy Agafonov, told Versttsi. According to his estimate, the number of dead may exceed 500 people.
According to Oleksiy, the commander of the mobilized battalion promised that they would be brought to the Svatov district, 15 kilometers from the front line, and there they will serve in “territorial defense”. However, on the night of November 1-2, the entire battalion was brought directly to the contact line, ordered to dig in and hold the defensive line.
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“We were thrown into the landing, told to dig in, and we had three shovels per battalion, there was no provision at all. We dug in as best we could, and in the morning the shelling began – artillery, “grads”, mortars, helicopters, they just shot us. When it all started, the officers immediately ran away. In the breaks between the attacks, we tried to dig in, but we were calculated by the copters and shot. Out of 570 people, as many as 29, another 12 were wounded, the rest are all,” Agafonov said.
He also added that at least one more battalion of mobilized soldiers was defeated at these positions before that. Agafonov said that he saw dozens of corpses, some of them “even had soldiers sticking out of their pockets”.
According to him, local and contract workers do not want to fight, and mobilized people from all over the country are brought to the Svatovo district to close the gaps in the defense. In Svatove, where Agafonov, who survived the battalion, retreated after the shelling, “groups of 2 to 5 people” from other broken battalions are going.
“There is complete confusion here. All those who survived and arrived again are grouped into new battalions and thrown to the front to close the line of defense. According to him, the Ukrainians cleared the entire territory where the mobilized were fighting.
The wife of another mobilized person, Hanna, told “Verstka” that the surviving mobilized people are asking to be allowed to go home.
“They are now asking for help to simply be released. They cannot be there now, they are afraid. They are being bombed there. No superiors, no one there. We want it to become known to everyone, as they did with the boys. They were thrown in like kittens, without training, nothing. And my husband and I have a daughter, she is one and a half years old,” said Hanna.
The Ukrainian military continues to advance in the Luhansk region, there are fierce battles in the Swatov and Kremensk directions, the head of the OVA said Serhii Gaidai.
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“Regarding Svatov in Kreminnaya: our defenders are not as fast as we would like, but they are moving forward. They walk approximately 500 meters a day.” Counteroffensives are complicated by weather conditions: it is difficult for vehicles to move on broken roads filled with rain. In addition, the occupiers managed to build defensive structures, replace the territories and bring in many mobilized.
