Ukraine ordered a full withdrawal from the ruined town of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine before dawn on Saturday, surrendering a city that had been a military stronghold for most of a decade in the face of withering Russian shelling and relentless attacks.
“Based on the operational situation around Avdiivka, in order to avoid encirclement and preserve the lives and health of the soldiers, I decided to withdraw our units from the city and proceed to the defense on more favorable lines,” General Oleksandr Syrsky , Ukraine’s top army commander, said in a statement issued at night.
The fall of Avdiivka, a town that was once home to around 30,000 people but is now a smoking ruin, is the first major gain by Russian forces since May last year. In recent weeks, Russian forces have pressed the offensive along almost the entire length of the 600-mile front.
Ukrainian forces had begun withdrawing from positions in the southern part of the city on Wednesday. They have been engaged in a desperate battle to avoid encirclement within the city for several days as Russian forces have advanced from several directions.
Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the head of Ukraine’s forces in the south, said there was no choice but to withdraw, given the Russian advantage in firepower and the number of soldiers they were willing to throw into battle.
“In a situation where the enemy is advancing on the corpses of their own soldiers with a 10-to-1 shell advantage, under constant shelling, this is the only correct solution,” he said in a statement.
Some soldiers privately expressed concern in interviews that the call to leave had come too late, or posted heated accounts on social media of their dangerous and chaotic retreat.
Viktor Bilyak of the 110th Brigade, which has been defending the city for the past two years, described Thursday’s evacuation of the garrison, known as Zenit, in a southern enclave of the city.
Mr Biliak, who goes by the call sign Hentai, said his unit had no time for a tactical sortie – neither to unload weapons and equipment, nor to burn paper and lay mines to attack Russian troops.
Ten men made an unsuccessful attempt to leave on Wednesday night, he said. They had to fight in front of a gun battle, but then came under artillery fire.
“Only three wounded returned,” Hedai wrote on Instagram. He helped rescue one of the wounded the next morning, he said, a dangerous move in broad daylight that cost the unit four more wounded, including himself.
Troops made another attempt on Thursday night and the seriously wounded were told to wait for an armored vehicle to pick them up.
“The teams were leaving, one after the other,” wrote Hentai. Still able to walk, he decided not to wait for the evacuation vehicle and led a team out.
“There was no visibility outside. It was simple survival. A kilometer beyond the stadium,” he wrote. “A bunch of blind cats piloted by a drone. Enemy artillery. The road to Avdiivka is littered with our corpses.’
The evacuation vehicle never came for the injured, he said. The last group left the bunker and heard a wounded soldier asking on the radio for the evacuation vehicle. The commander replied that no vehicle was coming, and that they should leave the wounded behind.
“He didn’t know he was talking to a wounded man,” wrote Hentai. “This radio dialogue has scarred us to our core.”
As the battle for Avdiivka intensified, Ukrainian commanders fighting in the area were forced to feed on ammunition, they said. White House officials have seized on similar accounts to argue that the failure to pass a renewed $60 billion military aid package in Congress was directly undermining the Ukrainians’ fight on the ground. The Ukrainian government is also struggling to recruit and mobilize soldiers to fill its depleted ranks after two years of often violent fighting.
The city and surrounding communities have been on the front lines since Russian-backed militants seized territory in eastern Ukraine in 2014, but the Russians stepped up their efforts to capture the city in October, launching large-scale offensives to encircle the the area. Those efforts have largely failed and resulted in some of the heaviest Russian casualties of the war, with tens of thousands of its soldiers killed and wounded, according to the Ukrainian military as well as British and US officials.
At the beginning of this year, the Russians managed to invade the city of Avdiivka itself, so Ukrainian losses began to increase significantly. At the same time, Russia stepped up its shelling of the city, seeking to overwhelm Ukraine’s heavily fortified defenses.
As the situation grew increasingly dire, military analysts inside and outside Ukraine worried that the leadership would repeat a mistake of the past: pretending that hope was lost and wasting Ukraine’s most valuable resource, its people.
The withdrawal from Avdiivka was still underway Saturday morning under the languor of Russian shelling. The Ukrainian military command said the withdrawal from the southern part of the city had been carried out with “minor losses”.
But posting soldiers Video on social media revealed how dangerous traffic had become in the area. In one video, several Ukrainian soldiers board an armored vehicle just half a mile from the Avdiivka chemical coke plant on the northwest edge of the city, a landmark.
They drive past the ‘Avdiivka is Ukraine’ sign at the entrance to the city, made famous when President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a selfie video from there in December. Seconds later, the soldiers duck and grimace as the shells land a few feet away, sending up clouds of dust and dirt.
On Friday, the commander of the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 3rd Assault Brigade said the Russians had used incendiary munitions to ignited tanks storing hazardous fuels in the coking plant;
“When burned, this poisonous substance has extremely serious consequences for the health and even the lives of our fighters,” he said in a statement. The wind sent plumes of toxic black smog over the city and seeped into the factory, which Ukrainians have long used as a bulwark against Russian advances.
It was unclear early Saturday if Ukrainian troops holed up in the plant had also withdrawn.
Volodymyr Furayev, a soldier stationed at the sprawling Soviet-era industrial plant, said his unit was ordered to evacuate.
“Leaving the coke factory,” Mr Furayev said in a TikTok post. “Everything is targeted. Hard to know where we’re going. Hello to everyone who knows me. I don’t know if we’ll make it.”
His and other accounts could not be independently verified, but the soldiers mentioned in this article are known to be members of the Ukrainian military with a public presence on social media, and the locations of the landscapes shown in the videos have been verified as being in Avdiivka from The New York Times.
Soldiers reached by phone Friday, who asked not to be named because of the ongoing military action, described a terrifying attempt to flee the city. They gave accounts of fighting through exploding buildings as shells thundered from everywhere and the Russians pressed from various directions.
“In one of the sectors of the city, fighters of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade are completely surrounded, but they are trying to break through and succeed,” said Major Rodion Kudryashov, deputy commander of the assault brigade. interview on Radio Liberty.
The 3rd Separate Assault Brigade was brought into Avdiivka about two weeks ago to help relieve the exhausted soldiers of the 110th Brigade.
Other units, including the 47th Brigade, which is equipped with American-supplied Bradley fighting vehicles, said they were tasked with blocking outlying areas to prevent a further Russian advance beyond Avdiivka.
“Avdiivka is a very important strong point in the Ukrainian defense system” because it protects Pokrovsk, about 30 miles to the northwest, a logistical hub for the Ukrainian military, Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Ukraine, said in an interview .
“Taking control of Avdiivka may create an opening for Russia,” he said.
Even if the lines stabilize after the Russians capture the city, its fall will allow the Russian army to move its troops and equipment more efficiently as it pushes in other directions.
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reports from Kharkiv, Ukraine and Malachy Browne from Limerick, Ireland.
