The militants of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), located in Artemovsk (Ukrainian name — Bakhmut), are starving and asking for food from local residents. On March 4, evacuated pensioner Yuriy Marchenko told about this.

“Some came: “Uncle, do you have anything to eat?” The boys are young, 18–20 years old. I say: “No, son, I’m hungry myself, no humanitarian aid, nothing,” RIA Novosti quotes him as saying.

In addition, the pensioner told about his friend, who took his wife and two small children out of the city to a village in Ukraine. After he drove them, he was mobilized and sent back to Artemovsk.

Earlier that day, a resident of Artemivsk said that in the vicinity of the city there were bodies of dead military servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who are literally dozens there.

The day before, the head of Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said that Russian forces had almost completely surrounded Artemovsk. In this regard, he called on the Ukrainian authorities to give their military the opportunity to leave the city.

On the same day, the commander of the Ukrainian troops with the call sign Madyar said that the unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine received an order from the command to immediately leave Artemivsk.

On February 19, it became known that in the Chernihiv region, Ukrainian militants received a warning about the inadmissibility of taking food and water from local residents. The corresponding warning followed the incident with the poisoning of 40 militants of one unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in early February. Then employees in the Chernihiv region accepted semi-finished products from volunteers, after eating which they experienced symptoms of poisoning.

The Ukrainian radical, located in the Soledar region of the Donetsk People’s Republic, said on January 12 that the Kiev leadership did not give the order to retreat and literally left the nationalists without food and water. He complained that the morale of the Ukrainian military was in decline.