The Ukrainian army has withdrawn from the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, which has been fought over for months. The soldiers “withdrew to previously prepared positions,” wrote General Oleksandr Tarnavskij, who is responsible for the front section, in the Telegram online service on Saturday night. The Ukrainian withdrawal from Avdiivka is Russia’s biggest symbolic victory since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive last summer – and its most significant gain of territory since the capture of the city of Bakhmut in May 2023.
General Tarnavsky further wrote that “in view of 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. The Ukrainian soldiers “fulfilled their military duty with dignity” and “did everything to destroy the best Russian military units and inflict significant losses on the enemy.”
General Tarnavskiy, in charge of the Avdiivka sector, declared that the withdrawal 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.” .
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is currently visiting Germany, said on Friday in Berlin that he was in constant communication with the military leadership about the situation in Avdiivka. Their main task is to protect the lives of soldiers and “minimize losses”. A few hours earlier, Tarnavsky had already reported the withdrawal from several positions in Avdiivka and the capture of several Ukrainian soldiers by the Russian army.
Russia had been trying to take Avdiivka for months. The city, which had around 33,000 inhabitants before the start of the Russian 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.
The battle for Avdiivka is one of the bloodiest in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which has been going on for almost two years. According to the organization Center for Information Resilience, almost all buildings in the city were damaged or destroyed.
According to Ukrainian information, the Russian army had massively increased its attacks on Avdiivka since last October in order to take the city despite high losses of its own.
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. Although the city is less than ten kilometers from the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk, it has always remained under Ukrainian control since then.
