Kyiv residents could inspect a number of damaged and captured Russian tanks in the capital on Saturday as Ukraine gets ready to commemorate its independence day.
A video shared on Twitter showed people in the Ukrainian capital taking pictures and even climbing on the destroyed armored vehicles.
Ukraine commemorates its independence from the Soviet Union on August 24. August 24 also marks six months since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian tanks rolled into downtown Kyiv on Saturday. But it was not the military parade that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia might have envisioned when he set his army to invade Ukraine in February.
Instead, the tanks arrived on the backs of Ukrainian flatbed trucks, collected from the battlefields in the east and south, and put on display in a show of defiance.
Even as the daily air sirens wailed, cranes lifted the battered tanks and placed them onto the elegant thoroughfare that leads to Maidan Square in central Kyiv. Crowds gathered throughout the day, taking pictures. Children climbed on the rusted hulks of missile launchers and armored vehicles. Police officers and soldiers mixed with families strolling along the square — all in a moment of respite from a war that has killed tens of thousands of people and laid once-thriving cities to waste.
