Russian wives in battlefield ‘rescue mission’

A GROUP of Russian women say they have set off for Ukraine to rescue their injured husbands who are believed to have been abandoned on the battlefield by their commanders.

They recorded a video outside an army base in Valuiki, 10 miles from the border with Ukraine, on Wednesday night saying they were going to cross the border and look for the men themselves since the military had turned down their pleas for help.

It is understood their husbands, who were recently called up in Kursk, Voronezh and Belgorod, came under heavy artillery fire outside Makiivka in eastern Ukraine, about 90 miles from the Russian border. Only 159 of the soldiers are thought to have survived the bombardment and many are said to be carrying their injured comrades on their backs as they struggle to get to safety.

“Our guys are being thrown into the fight like blind kittens into a fire – they’re not allowed to retreat, they’re threatened with execution and will be listed as missing because formally they are not part of any military unit,” Svetalana Gorbatenko, who is pregnant with her third child, said in a post on Vkontakte, a Russian social network.

Her husband, and the other members of his unit, were sent to Ukraine a week after they were mobilised “with no training, supplies or command”, she said. In the video posted earlier this week one woman can be heard demanding that military officials return their husbands or they will “tear them apart”.

Yulia, the wife of another mobilised man, said the commander of his company told her only 30 out of 200 men had survived the Ukrainian attack. Her husband was “crying for help”, she said.

More than 300,000 men, many of them with little or no military experience, were called up to fight in Ukraine in September without being given the most basic equipment.