#Abandoned village stronghold kingdoms full#
Two units – accounting for about a sixth of the total force – were operating at 20% of their full strength. By the end of August, the documents show, the force was depleted, hit by death, desertions and combat stress. Their equipment for jamming Ukrainian communications was often out of action. They were using off-the-shelf drones flown by barely trained soldiers. In the weeks before that defeat, Russian forces were struggling with surveillance and electronic warfare. They detail the inner workings of the Russian military and shed new light on events leading up to one of President Vladimir Putin's most stinging battlefield defeats: Russia’s chaotic retreat from Ukraine’s northeast in September. Reuters reviewed more than a thousand of them. In all, the bunker yielded thousands of pages of documents. And accounts of a breakdown in morale and discipline. The book’s 91 handwritten pages contained other information, too: coordinates of Russian intelligence units, records of calls from commanders, details of battles, men killed and equipment destroyed. In a floral notebook, an unnamed staff officer left a sketch of a cartoon soldier and mused about going home. A bunker smelling of damp lay behind a steel door marked “Command Group.” Papers, some charred, were stuffed into a furnace.
But they left their traces everywhere.Ĭoncrete steps led into the basement of their hastily abandoned headquarters in this small riverside town in eastern Ukraine.
When Russian troops fled the Ukrainian town of Balakliia last month, they left behind thousands of documents that detail the inner workings of the Russian war machine.īy MARI SAITO, MARIA TSVETKOVA and ANTON ZVEREV Photographs by ZOHRA BENSEMRAīALAKLIIA, Ukraine – The Russian soldiers had fled weeks before.
0 kommentar(er)
