Avdïivka has fallen. The Ukrainian army withdrew on Saturday February 16 from this city in the east of the country, granting Russia its greatest symbolic victory after the failure of the counter-offensive launched by kyiv in the summer of 2023.
“In accordance with the order received, [we] withdrew from Avdiïvka to positions prepared in advance,” announced Ukrainian General Oleksandr Tarnavsky, who commands this area, in a message published on the social network Telegram during the 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. Armed with more soldiers and more ammunition, Moscow pushed its troops to achieve conquest, a few days before the second anniversary of the start of the invasion, on 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,” General Tarnavsky justified. 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, appointed on February 8. He motivated it by the desire to “preserve” the lives of his soldiers.
Russian forces ‘surplus’
“I decided to withdraw our units from the city and switch to defense on more favorable lines,” Oleksandr Syrsky 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 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.
This town in eastern Ukraine 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 for ten years. .
According to kyiv, the Russian army has been increasing assault waves since October 2023 to take Avdiïvka, despite very high human losses. The situation was reminiscent of the battle of Bakhmut, a city that Moscow conquered in May 2023 after ten months of fighting, at the cost of tens of thousands of dead and wounded.
Zelensky expected in Munich
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 Avdiïvka comes at a time when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is leading a European tour. In Berlin, he said he was in constant contact with the military command whose main task was, according to him, 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 the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, then in Paris with the French President, Emmanuel Macron. He plans to attend the security conference in Munich on Saturday and meet US Vice President Kamala Harris there.
