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A Ukrainian service member walks in a front of an Antonov An-225 Mriya cargo plane, the world's biggest aircraft, destroyed by Russian troops as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, at an airfield in the settlement of Hostomel, in Kyiv region, Ukraine April 3, 2022. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich (Gleb Garanich / reuters)

The last three Russian soldiers in this Ukrainian town are in the mortuary, with their uniforms torn and bloodied. The first one has a frozen face. The second has something in his lap. The third is inside his sleeping bag.

There are more dead in Trostyanets, a strategically located town in the country's northeast, where Russian forces fled several days ago in the face of an orchestrated Ukrainian assault. A monthlong Russian occupation reduced much of the town to rubble, a decimated landscape of mangled tank hulks, snapped trees, and rattled but resilient survivors.

There are stories of children held at knifepoint, an old woman forced to drink alcohol, and whispers of rape and forced disappearance, all of which are impossible to verify.

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"Oh, God, how I wanted to hit them, or spit on them," said Yevdokiya Koneva as she pushed her bicycle toward the center of town.

Russian forces are pulling back from their positions north of the capital as Ukrainian forces are making progress in the northeast. This area was supposed to be little more than a speedbump for a lengthy military campaign that would quickly take the country's capital and leave the east in Russian hands.

Logistic issues, poor planning and low morale among Russian forces allowed the Ukrainian military to go on the offensive, grinding down the occupying forces and splintering their front lines.

The Ukrainian victory in Trostyanets came on March 26th, and is an example of how disadvantaged and smaller Ukrainian units have launched successful counterattacks.

The Russian military was unable to win a quick victory in which it would have a friendly population.

The woman who was walking in the rain after collecting a package of humanitarian aid said they didn't want this.

Interviews with more than a dozen residents of Trostyanets, a modest town of about 19,000 situated in a bowl of rolling hills roughly 20 miles from the Russian border, show a stark picture of struggle and fear during the Russian occupation. People were forced to take refuge in the basement or anywhere they could find a shelter during the weeks of fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian forces.

On Friday, the residents of the city walked through what was left of their city, sorting through the debris as power was restored for the first time in weeks. Viktor Panov, a railway worker, was helping to clear the train station of unexploded shells, grenades and other scattered explosives. Other men cannibalized Russian armored vehicles.

The head doctor at the hospital and the deputy head of the town council said that the war with tanks and missiles is possible. The peaceful civilians?

She said that this is true barbarity.

The war began in Trostyanets on February 24. The town became a main route for Russian tank columns as they moved farther west. armored vehicles broke highway guard rails and chewed up roads

The guys fought back well, as long as they had heavy weapons, Panov said.

The Russians were stopped short of the capital by fierce Ukrainian resistance, meaning that soldiers would have to occupy Trostyanets rather than just move through it. Roughly 800 troops fanned out, constructing a dozen or so checkpoints that cut the town into a grid of isolated neighborhoods.

Residents say they rarely tried to move through the Russian positions, even though they described the soldiers occupying them as more confused than anything in the first days of the occupation.

The first brigade of Russian forces came in and they were more or less accepted.

Volkova explained that the help was just allowing them to remove corpses from the streets. She said that 20 people had been killed during the occupation and 10 had suffered gunshot wounds.

Some people were kidnapped when the Russian troops opened green corridors for civilians to leave the town.

Police officers took off their uniforms early in the occupation. The Territorial Defense of Ukraine, the equivalent of the National Guard, was used by those who were in the town to document Russian troop movement and report it to the Ukrainian military.

The police chief explained that others remained in the town, even as Russian soldiers hunted them.

Food and goodwill from the soldiers vanished as the days and weeks went by. Residents boiled snow for water and lived off what they had left from their gardens. Russian soldiers began to loot people's homes, shops, and even the local chocolate factory. One butcher painted his shop so soldiers wouldn't break in. On another store, another deterrent: Devoted is taken, nothing left.

The Russian soldiers were replaced by fighters from the southeast by mid-March.

Residents said that atrocities began to mount after that.

They were loud and angry. They wouldn't give us any green corridors, they searched the apartments, took away the phones, and we still don't know where the people are.

The town's police had received 15 reports of missing people as of Friday.

She pointed to a body bag in the corner of the room and said that the person had been tortured to death. They don't know what they wanted from him.

The 93rd Mechanized brigade, a unit of experienced veterans who had seen combat off and on in the country, slowly moved into position outside the town. They attacked with a bombardment of fire.

The hospital was hit the next day. Local residents accuse the Russians of firing into the building, but it is not clear who hit it. The hospital had been open for the duration of the occupation and had treated everyone. During the shelling, only one doctor and one nurse were working there, and they moved into the basement with patients.

In the morning, we went away on foot with the last two women still in the maternity ward, one pregnant and one that had just given birth. It was the cry from the bottom of the soul that the tank shells had gone through the walls, shredding baby posters and lighting at least one room on fire.

The Russian forces left on the 25th. The train station square had an undersupplied and ad hoc force. Fortifications used to include crates of sand and candy bar wrappers, which were used to shore up shattered windows. Uniforms are wet. Russian supply documents were blowing in the wind.

The monument that commemorates the World War II victory to regain the town was damaged but not destroyed. It had fought one more time.

By Friday afternoon, he was sorting through reports of people who collaborated with the former occupiers, as well as trying to address continued loot. There were no issues snaring fuel from the abandoned Russian tanks.

This person was talking or drinking with the Russians, and this person pointed them to the home of the person they were looking for.

It was hard to tell if he was dealing with Russian spies or just neighborly grudge, as there was no information on collaborations such as our citizens taking arms along with the occupants or treating their own citizens with violence.

The rain had stopped by the afternoon. There were no longer long lines around humanitarian aid distribution points. A garbage truck was loaded to the brim with war waste. A few people took selfies in front of the last Russian piece of self-propelled artillery.

The day had turned out well for Galyna, an employee of the local seed and gardening supplies shop near the train station.

She said, "We will sow; we will grow; we will live."

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