Avdiivka, a Ukrainian town taken by Russia, shown in ruins
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[February 20, 2024]
By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The trees are splintered, the houses wrecked, the
surviving civilians live in basements, NATO ammunition has been
abandoned - this is the picture shown by footage released by Russia from
the ruins of the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka.
The town, once with a population of 32,000, fell to Russia on Saturday,
President Vladimir Putin's biggest victory since Moscow captured the
city of Bakhmut in May 2023.
Television footage released by Russia's defense ministry showed that
almost every house in Avdiivka was branded with war. An unidentified
Russian soldier walked past a wasteland of rubble, describing a chaotic
Ukrainian retreat.
The cupola of a church was in pieces, roads were strewn with the
detritus of war including a wrecked armored vehicle and whole apartment
blocks hung down broken, seeping out lives long abandoned into the snow.
The soldier showed baked beans and chilli military rations supplied by
Canada, brand new NATO 7.62 mm M118 cartridges, 120 mm mortars and a box
with "Choctaw Defense Manufacturing Group" printed on them.
Reuters was able to confirm the location of some of the footage released
by the defense ministry by the structure and design of nearby buildings,
a bridge and train tracks which matched file and satellite imagery.
Reuters was not able to independently verify when the video was taken.
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Beside dogs, a woman named Tatiana, one of just a few hundred civilians
still living in the ruins, told of a life huddling in basements and
running to collect water in plastic containers during any lull in the
fighting.
"It was scary of course - very scary," Tatiana said in Russian in the
footage. "We are so happy that you have come."
"We live in the basements. We don't live in flats. All our flats are
wrecked. After the start of the special operation we went down into the
basements."
Ukraine said it withdrew its soldiers to save troops from being fully
surrounded after months of fierce fighting. Putin hailed the fall of
Avdiivka as an important victory and congratulated Russian troops.
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![](../images/022024PIX/news_f79.jpg)
Nadezhda Prokopenko clears debris in the yard of the house of a
relative that was destroyed in a Russian missile strike, amid
Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Selydove near Avdiivka, Ukraine,
February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File Photo
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After the failure of Ukraine to pierce Russian lines last year,
Moscow has been trying to grind down Ukrainian forces just as Kyiv
ponders a major new mobilization. Ukraine's President Volodymyr
Zelenskiy appointed a new commander last week to run the war.
Russia cast the Ukrainian withdrawal from Avdiivka as rushed and
chaotic, with some soldiers and weapons left behind. The Ukrainian
military said there had been casualties but that the situation had
stabilized somewhat after the retreat.
Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February
2022, triggering full-scale war after eight years of conflict in
eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces on one side and pro-Russian
Ukrainians and Russian proxies on the other.
Avdiivka, which is called Avdeyevka by Russians, has endured a
decade of conflict. It holds particular symbolism for Russia as it
was briefly taken in 2014 by Moscow-backed separatists who seized a
swathe of eastern Ukraine but was then recaptured by Ukrainian
troops who built extensive fortifications.
Avdiivka sits in the industrial Donbas region, 15 km (9 miles) north
of the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk. Before the war, the
Soviet-era coke plant was one of Europe's biggest.
Western intelligence assessments say hundreds of thousands of men on
both sides have been killed or wounded in the war.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Peter Graff)
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