However, Zelensky emphasized in Munich that this meant no advantage for the Russian army: Russia had “conquered nothing,” he said. Saving our own soldiers “is the most important task for us,” Zelensky continued at the meeting. At the conference, Zelensky blamed Ukraine’s lack of success in the war on a lack of artillery and long-range weapons.
The Ukrainian army announced its withdrawal from Avdiivka on Saturday night. The soldiers “withdrew to previously prepared positions,” wrote General Oleksandr Tarnavskij, who is responsible for the front section, in the online Telegram service.
Tarnavsky further wrote that “given the operational situation around Avdiivka,” he had decided to “withdraw the units from the city” and “shift the defense to more favorable lines in order to avoid encirclement and to protect the life and health of the soldiers.” .
The withdrawal from the city is the first significant decision by the newly appointed Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrskyj on February 8th. “I have decided to withdraw our units from the city and switch to a more favorable defense line,” Syrskyj said on the online service Facebook.
Tarnavskiy declared that retreat was “the only correct decision” in a situation in which “the enemy is advancing over the corpses of his own soldiers, with a superiority of ten to one, under constant fire.” According to Tarnavsky, the Ukrainian soldiers are now holding the position on a second line of defense.
Several Ukrainian soldiers were captured “in the final stages of the operation under pressure from superior enemy forces,” the general continued. He called on the international community to “return our soldiers to their homeland.”
A Ukrainian soldier deployed on the eastern front told the AFP news agency that it was the right decision “given the lack of weapons and artillery shells.” At the same time he said: “But if we continue to lose ground, we will lose this war.”
Russia had been trying to take Avdiivka for months. The city, which had around 33,000 inhabitants before the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, is located in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. This is one of four regions that the Kremlin declared annexed in 2022.
Russian forces are “pushing us a little bit out of the temporarily occupied” Donetsk region, political scientist Mykola Belyeskov from the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Kiev told AFP. However, this does not give Russia any advantage, he continued. “I doubt that Russia has the ability to turn limited local successes into a major breakthrough after such overwhelming losses.”
The battle for Avdiivka is one of the fiercest in the Ukrainian war that has been going on for almost two years. Avdiivka also has great symbolic significance because pro-Russian separatists led from Moscow had already taken the city in July 2014 – but Ukrainian units took it back under their control shortly afterwards.
