The Ukrainian army was forced to abandon the eastern town of Avdiivka on Saturday, handing Russia its biggest symbolic victory after Kyiv’s counter-offensive failed. last summer.
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“In accordance with the order received, (we) withdrew from Avdiïvka to go to positions prepared in advance,” announced Ukrainian general Oleksandr Tarnavsky, who commands this area, in a message published on the social network Telegram night from Friday to Saturday.
Faced with a growing lack of resources due in particular to the blocking of American military aid, Ukraine could hardly avoid this withdrawal in the face of Russia which, with more soldiers and ammunition, was pushing its troops to obtain a conquest at a few days before the second anniversary of the start of the invasion, February 24.
“In the situation where the enemy is advancing by walking over the corpses of its own soldiers and has ten times more shells (…) this is the only right decision,” continued General Tarnavsky. The Ukrainian forces thus avoided encirclement, near this largely destroyed industrial city, he assured.
This is a first major decision by the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armies Oleksandr Syrsky after his appointment to this post on February 8. He justified it by the desire to “preserve” the lives of his soldiers.
“With dignity”
“I decided to withdraw our units from the city and switch to defense on more favorable lines,” Oleksandr Syrsky previously wrote on Facebook. “Our soldiers performed their military duty with dignity, did everything possible to destroy the best Russian military units and inflicted significant losses on the enemy,” continued General Syrsky.
Before formalizing the abandonment of the city, General Tarnavsky had acknowledged that “several soldiers” Ukrainian had been “captured” by Russian forces, who are “surplus in terms of manpower, artillery and aviation “.
Avdiïvka, which had around 34,000 inhabitants before the Russian invasion launched in February 2022, has an important symbolic value.
The city is now largely destroyed but some 900 civilians remain there, according to local authorities. Moscow hopes its capture will make Ukrainian bombing of Donetsk more difficult.
The city briefly fell in July 2014 into the hands of pro-Russian separatists led by Moscow, before returning to Ukrainian control and remaining so despite the invasion and its proximity to Donetsk, the separatist capital in eastern Ukraine since ten years.
According to Kyiv, the Russian army has been multiplying the assault waves since October to take Avdiivka, despite very high human losses, a situation reminiscent of the battle of Bakhmout, a city that Moscow conquered in May 2023 after 10 months of fighting at the cost tens of thousands of deaths and injuries.
After the failure of the Ukrainian summer counter-offensive, it was the Russians who went on the attack, facing a Ukrainian army which was struggling to replenish its ranks and which was lacking ammunition.
The capture of Avdiivka comes at a time when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is leading a European tour. He indicated from Berlin that he was in permanent contact with the military command, whose main task, according to him, was to preserve 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 plans to attend the Security Conference in Munich on Saturday and meet US Vice President Kamala Harris there.