MOSCOW, February 20. /TASS/. Ukrainian troops were leaving their dead and wounded comrades behind during their withdrawal from Avdeyevka, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said in an interview with TASS Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Petrov.

"We saw that this is a fortified area that had taken nine years to build. <...> They were not retrieving the dead, abandoning the wounded; they left a large amount of weapons and military hardware behind," he said.