"Eighty percent of Debaltseve is already ours," said Eduard Basurin, leader of the DPR forces. "A clean-up of the town is under way."
He later said negotiations were under way for remaining Kiev troops to surrender.
"Hundreds" had been captured and would eventually be released to their families. Kiev denied that the number of captives was that high.
Kiev forces had been ordered by their leadership not to surrender.
"I hope that the responsible figures in the Ukrainian leadership will not hinder soldiers in the Ukrainian army from putting down their weapons," Putin said.
"If they aren’t capable of taking that decision themselves and giving that order, then (I hope) that they won’t prosecute people who want to save their lives and the lives of others.”
The situation in Debaltseve has led Ukrainians to draw likenesses to the summer siege of Ilovaysk, during which the Donbas battalion claimed 1,000 soldiers had died.
“We have had Ilovaysk. Now we have Debaltseve,” Aleksander Chelobitchenko, a senior lieutenant on the Ukrainian side of the Joint Control Commission, a combined Ukrainian-Russian observation team based in Soledar, said Tuesday. “If you keep cutting the branches off a tree, eventually the tree will die. This is very bad, to lose all this.”
“It’s not just the people. It’s also the equipment and the weapons there,” he said. “If one side takes over the equipment, they can turn it against the other side.”
The soldiers in Debaltseve were a significant part of the Kiev army’s ready fighting force. A year ago, before the war commenced, that number would have been almost the entire combat-ready force of the country, according to estimates the defense minister provided to parliament at the time.
In other words, they just destroyed the greater part of Kiev's army. Bet Poroshenko already has his bags packed. See, there was a military solution, just not the one the West wanted.
