Towed away gleefully as if it were parked illegally, the Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier doesn’t look so intimidating as it is paraded before the delighted Ukrainians gathered to celebrate its seizure.
Theoretically, the 1970s MT-LB belongs to the Russian forces but they abandoned it in Ukraine’s northeast, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the warring neighbours’ shared border.
“We needed two tractors to pull it out, which we were able to do after the military demined the field,” the 44-year-old tells a group of reporters gathered to cover the spectacle.
Denysenko followed the example of farmers across the country by donating his quarry to the military.
Ukrainian farmers have commandeered so many Russian vehicles in areas occupied and then abandoned by Moscow’s withdrawing forces that wags on the internet began calling them Europe’s “fifth-largest army.”
Now their chutzpah is being celebrated by the country’s national postal service, which had representatives in Mala Rogan on Thursday to launch a new stamp depicting one of the infamous heists.
It is unclear which Ukrainian first towed a Russian tank but the craze really took hold when Viktor Kychuk and his friends took charge of a Soviet T-80 on March 1 in Slatyne, a northeastern town of 6,000, just 13 kilometres from Russia.
“There was a lot of discarded equipment, but the local team made the best of it,” he added.
– Symbol of defiance –
The Ukrposhta postal service has become something of a symbol of Ukrainian defiance after issuing a stamp in April depicting a soldier making giving the middle finger to the Russian Black Sea flagship Moskva.
In Kyiv on Thursday there was a huge queue of people outside the central post office waiting to snap up the latest stamp.
“This is how we support the struggle of our people against the Russian aggressor,” life-long stamp collector Vitaliy, 60, told AFP.
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Originally published as Tug-of-war: Ukraine celebrates its tank-towing farmers
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