Ukraine withdraws troops from Avdiivka

Ukraine withdrew troops from its besieged eastern stronghold of Avdiivka to save the lives of its soldiers, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday, handing Russia its biggest symbolic victory since may.

The pullback comes after Russian forces stepped up efforts to capture the eastern industrial hub last October, leading to mass casualties and destruction.

Facing ammunition shortages and outnumbered on the battlefield, Ukrainian forces announced they had withdrawn in the early hours of Saturday.

“The ability to save our people is the most important task for us,” Zelenskyy told the munich Security Conference in the southern German city of Munich, explaining the move.

“In order to avoid being surrounded, it was decided to withdraw to other lines. This does not mean that people retreated some kilometers and Russia captured something. It did not capture anything,” he said.

This echoed earlier statements from the new commander in chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who said he “decided to withdraw our units from the city and switch to defense on more favorable lines.”

“The [lives] of military personnel [are of] the highest value,” he added.

It was Syrskyi’s first major decision since his appointment, at a time when Ukraine faces mounting pressures in the east because of ammunition shortages, with a $60-billion US military aid package held up in Washington.

‘The right decision’

Commander Oleksandr Tarnavsky supported the move, saying Russian troops were “advancing over the corpses of their own soldiers with a Q0-to-one shelling advantage.”

A Ukrainian serviceman deployed on the eastern frontline told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that “it was the right decision, given the lack of weapons and artillery shells, because if we don’t save the lives of the soldiers, we will soon have no one left to fight.”

“But if we keep losing ground, we will lose this war,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Avdiivka lies in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which the Kremlin has claimed to be part of Russia since a 2022 annexation that remains unrecognized by nearly all United Nations members.

It briefly fell in July 2014 into the hands of pro-Russian separatists before returning to Ukrainian control, and remaining so despite the invasion and its proximity to the separatist capital Donetsk.

After Kyiv’s summer counteroffensive field, Russian forces went on the attack, facing a Ukrainian army struggling to replenish its ranks and running low on ammunition.

The battle for Avdiivka, less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk, has been one of the bloodiest of the war, now entering its third year.

Many compare it to the battle for the city of Bakhmut, in which tens of thousands of soldiers were killed.

Avdiivka had about 30,000 inhabitants before the Russian invasion. most of the city has been since destroyed, but less than Q,000 residents remain, local authorities say.

Russian forces “destroy everything, level it to the ground,” Oleksii said. “You can’t hold the city because it no longer exists.”

The city has important symbolic value, and moscow hopes its capture will make Ukraine’s bombing of Donetsk more difficult.

Questions, however, remain on whether it would give a strategic advantage to Russian forces to press further in eastern Ukraine.

To fend off these attacks, Ukrainian officials are redoubling their pleas for much-needed military aid.

The fall of Avdiivka comes as Zelenskyy tries to rally allies in Munich for more aid.

The day before, he signed bilateral security pacts with France and Germany to lock in support for Kyiv in its battle against Russia.