Abandoned Russian military base holds secrets of retreat in Ukraine

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The Russian soldiers had fled from a military base in the small riverside town of Balakliia in eastern Ukraine, but their traces remained everywhere. Concrete steps led into the basement of a hastily-abandoned headquarters, with bunkers behind steel doors and charred paper scattered across the floor.

Documents in the bunkers yielded thousands of pages of information, detailing the inner workings of the Russian military and shedding 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.

According to Reuters, in the weeks before that defeat, the documents showed that Russian forces were struggling with surveillance and electronic warfare. Their equipment for jamming Ukrainian communications was often out of action, and the documents showed that their forces were depleted by the end of August.

"There were two other women in the cell. It was horrible, scary — not knowing what was going on, what to expect next. Confusion, sounds from the outside, sounds from the torture cells. It was bad, all I wanted was to get out of there as quickly as possible,” said Albina Strilets, a 33-year-old logistics coordinator for Ukrainian emergency services.

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