Courtesy of Mish.
More details show the alleged "orderly retreat" of Debaltsevsky by Ukrainian forces was anything but orderly. Now that the city has fallen, Germany and France have again renewed efforts at a ceasefire.
Yahoo!News reports Debaltseve Under Rebel Control, Cossack Fighters Celebrate. My inline comments are in braces.
Rebel fighters, many of them Cossacks roamed the streets of Debaltseve on Thursday, a day after Ukrainian forces began withdrawing from the besieged town. The mood was celebratory, with fighters laughing, hugging each other and posing for photos.
[See Wikipedia for a description of the term Cossacks]
Associated Press journalists drove Thursday around about half of the key rail hub that has been the focus of weeks of fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russia-backed separatists and government troops. They found all its neighborhoods under the control of rebel fighters.
On the road out of town, dozens of Ukrainian military vehicles were retreating to the government-held town of Artemivsk. Many were riddled with bullet holes or had their windshields destroyed. Soldiers in them spoke of enduring weeks of harrowing rebel shelling, barrages designed to annihilate their ranks.
"Starting at night, they would fire at us just to stop us from sleeping," a Ukrainian soldier named Andrei told the AP, sitting in his truck outside Artemivsk. "They did this all night. Then in the morning, they would attack, wave after wave. They did this constantly for three weeks."
[All the while Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said his troops were not surrounded. That charade continued even through the Minsk II ceasefire agreement. In fact, refusal to admit the loss of Debaltsevsky, coupled with Kiev reneging on both amnesty promises and on promised constitutional reforms is why the ceasefire had no chance from the beginning.]
As rebels waved separatist flags in Debaltseve, Nikolai Kozitsyn, a Russian Cossack leader and prominent warlord in separatist eastern Ukraine, drove around in a Humvee-like vehicle captured from Ukrainian troops.
Two rebel fighters inspected a tank left behind by Ukrainians, what they called a "gift" from the government troops.
Capturing the town is a significant military victory for the rebels because it's a railway junction that straddles the most direct route between Donetsk and Luhansk, the separatists' two main cities.
France and Germany, which oversaw marathon peace talks between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders last week in Minsk, Belarus, both signaled Thursday that they're determined to salvage the cease-fire deal and keep the two sides talking….
Picture source here.
