MOSCOW, January 17. /TASS/. More and more Ukrainian soldiers in the Zaporozhye direction are opting to come over to the Russian side, Vladimir Rogov, leader of the We Are Together with Russia movement, said on Tuesday.
"More and more guys are crossing over to the other side, finding a way to do it," he said in an interview with the Solovyov Live television channel.
He said that he is speaking not about one or five soldiers but there are more than ten of them, who "don’t want to fight, kill, and ultimately, die for the [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky regime." "Our soldiers at defense posts are also perplexed to see so many people who say they want to surrender," he added.
According to Rogov, anti-retreat units have been formed in the Ukrainian army, mostly from militants of nationalist battalions and special forces. "They are not deployed to the first line of engagement, they are deployed to the second and third lines," he said. "Notably, in the Zaporozhye direction, anti-retreat units - punitive structures - are made of militants of the Azov nationalist battalion (outlawed in Russia as a terrorist organization - TASS), Kraken and other Nazi units, which terrorize territorial defense soldiers in Zaporozhye."
He told TASS earlier that militants from the Kraken and Azov nationalist battalions deployed to the contact line in the Zaporozhye region as anti-retreat units have killed seven and wounded 18 soldiers of Ukrainian territorial defense units since mid-December. The Ukrainian side says, however, that these soldiers had been killed in combat operations, he added.