The Ukrainian army was forced to abandon the eastern town of Avdiivka on Saturday, handing Russia its biggest symbolic victory since the failure of Kiev's counteroffensive last summer.
• Also read: ON VIDEO | A flag hoisted by Russian forces on the shield of the city of Avdiivka
“In accordance with the received order, we have withdrawn from Avdiivka to positions prepared in advance,” Ukrainian General Oleksandr Tarnavsky, who commands this area, announced in a message posted on the Telegram social network on the night of Friday to Saturday .
Faced with a growing lack of resources, especially due to the blockage of American military aid, Ukraine could hardly escape this withdrawal in the face of Russia, which pushed its troops to achieve a conquest with more soldiers and ammunition just days before the second anniversary of the start of the invasion, the February 24th.
“In the situation where the enemy advances by walking over the corpses of his own soldiers and has ten times more grenades (…), this is the only correct decision,” General Tarnavsky continued. The Ukrainian armed forces would have avoided an encirclement near this largely destroyed industrial city, he assured.
This is the first important decision of the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armies Oleksandr Syrsky after his appointment to this position on February 8. He justified this with the desire to “preserve” the lives of his soldiers.
“With dignity”
“I have decided to withdraw our units from the city and move to defense on more favorable lines,” Oleksandr Syrsky previously wrote on Facebook. “Our soldiers fulfilled their military duty with dignity, did everything to destroy the best Russian military units and inflicted significant losses on the enemy,” General Syrsky continued.
Before formalizing the city's abandonment, General Tarnavsky had admitted that “several Ukrainian soldiers” had been “captured” by Russian forces that were “surplus in manpower, artillery and aviation.”
Avdiivka, which had a population of around 34,000 before the Russian invasion began in February 2022, has important symbolic value.
According to local authorities, the city is now largely destroyed, but around 900 civilians still live there. Moscow hopes its capture will complicate the Ukrainian bombing of Donetsk.
The city briefly fell into the hands of pro-Russian separatists led by Moscow in July 2014 before returning to Ukrainian control and remaining so despite the invasion and its proximity to Donetsk, the separatist capital in eastern Ukraine for a decade.
According to Kiev, since October the Russian army has multiplied its waves of attacks to take Avdiivka, despite very high losses of life, a situation reminiscent of the Battle of Bakhmout, a city that Moscow captured in May 2023 after ten months of fighting that left tens of thousands dead and injured.
After the failure of the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive, the Russians went on the attack, facing a Ukrainian army struggling to replenish its ranks and short of ammunition.
The capture of Avdiivka comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is leading a European tour. He stated from Berlin that he was in constant contact with the military leadership, whose main task, in his opinion, was to save the lives of soldiers and “minimize losses.”
In this tense context, Mr. Zelensky signed two bilateral security agreements on Friday in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and then in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. He wants to take part in the security conference in Munich on Saturday and meet US Vice President Kamala Harris there.