Even as they joked last week that Russian troops are retreating so quickly from eastern Ukraine that soldiers are leaving behind caches of weapons and ammunition, Ukrainian officials are quietly lobbying the US for weapons, according to a report.

Behind the scenes, Ukraine government officials are still seeking Patriot air-defense systems and F-16 fighter jets in their battle against Russian troops and are brokering long-term financing deals to achieve their goals, according to a report in Politico Friday.

Although Ukraine had been openly seeking high-powered weapons from the US since the beginning of hostilities in February, the change from a public campaign to a private one  “came as advisers grew concerned that the requests for high-end weapons were a distraction from Kyiv’s more immediate battlefield needs and concerns that the asks were muddling their tightly-scripted message,” the magazine reported.

As Russian troops abandoned parts of eastern Ukraine last week, including key Russian supply hubs, Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor at the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs joked about the stores of weapons they left behind.

“Today our military accepted first lend-lease supplies from Russia in Izyum (that’s a joke, of course. I will mark my jokes for some time now),” he wrote. “Russian soldiers fled so fast they left half of their equipment.”