The guns had gone quiet after three days of fighting in the battle-scarred northeast Ukrainian town of Balakliia, but Mariya Tymofiyeva said it was only when she saw Ukrainian soldiers that it hit her that over six months of Russian occupation had ended.
"I was walking away... when I saw an armoured personnel carrier coming onto the square with a Ukrainian flag: my heart just tightened up and I began to sob," the 43-year-old resident said, her voice trembling with emotion.
A short walk away, regional police officers led reporters to the burial place of two people. The bodies had been exhumed and were laid out on the grass in open body bags. Prices in shops were being given in both Russian roubles and the Ukrainian hryvnia; pensioners were paid in roubles, she said. At one point, her husband was made to strip to his underwear in the street to make sure he had no pro-Ukrainian tattoos and had not served in the Ukrainian army fighting Russian-backed forces in the Donbas region, she said.
"Occasionally there was soup - if the soldiers didn't eat it, it was a kind of celebration," he said.The road to Balakliia through liberated areas was littered with charred vehicles and destroyed military hardware.
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