A Russian serviceman stands guard at the destroyed part of the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works in Ukraine’s port city of Mariupol on May 18, 2022.
OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP via Getty Images
Ukrainian resistance fighters say they’ve conducted a mass poisoning of Russian soldiers. Partisans in occupied Mariupol say they killed 26 soldiers, according to the Kyiv Post.Mariupol, in the south of Ukraine, has been under Russian occupation since May 2022.
Ukrainian resistance fighters in occupied Mariupol say they’ve killed 26 Russian soldiers, the majority of whom died by poisoning, according to the Kyiv Post.
A further 15 soldiers ended up in the hospital as a result of the recent operation, the unnamed partisans told the outlet.
“It became possible because of a new rotation and because the orcs are idiots,” one Ukrainian partisan told the paper, using a derogatory term for Russian soldiers.
The Ukrainians did not elaborate on the specifics of the incident, but told the paper that the Russians “were fed poison. The cooks are safe now, as are their families.”
It’s unclear when the alleged poisoning took place.
The port city of Mariupol, in the south of Ukraine, has been under Russian occupation since May last year, after colossal bombardment and a weekslong siege of the Azovstal steel plant.
Since then, Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to normalize the occupation by building new homes and infrastructure, and enticing Russian citizens to buy property there.
On Sunday, the UK’s Ministry of Defence reported that Russia is likely shoring up its military ground lines of communication with the construction of a new railway line to Mariupol, which would fall within the strike range of Ukrainian long-range missiles.
Within the city itself, resistance has never gone away, according to Petro Andriushchenko, an advisor to the city’s elected mayor, who on Monday also shared the claims of the recent poisoning.
In a post on Telegram, he added that over the summer more than 40 Russian soldiers had been killed by Mariupol’s resistance fighters.
In August, Ukrainian partisans claimed to have poisoned 17 soldiers during a Russian Navy Day celebration, killing two and hospitalizing the other 15, Andriushchenko said in a Telegram post at the time.
In that instance, he suggested that their food had been laced with cyanide and pesticides.