Shaun Walker – The Guardian Feb 17, 2024
Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from the eastern city of Avdiivka to avoid encirclement, army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has said, marking the biggest change on the frontlines since Russian forces captured Bakhmut in May last year.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, the recently appointed Syrskyi said he had acted to “preserve the lives and health of servicemen”, stabilise the situation and move troops to more favourable defence lines.
“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 in terms of manpower and equipment,” he said. “The life of military personnel is [of] the highest value.”
A day earlier, the Ukrainian commander responsible for forces in the south-east of the country had said Kyiv’s forces had withdrawn from some positions in the town.
“New positions have been prepared and powerful fortifications continue to be prepared, taking into account all possible scenarios,” Oleksandr Tarnavskiy said in a statement on social media on Friday.
In a Saturday statement issued just after Syrskyi’s he added, “In a situation where the enemy is advancing on the corpses of their own soldiers with a ten-to-one shell advantage, under constant bombardment, this [withdrawal] is the only correct solution.”
As the two-year mark of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches, Ukrainian troops are under pressure along the frontline, with depleted and exhausted ranks and a shortage of artillery shells that has been exacerbated by the stalling of a large US funding package.
The US president, Joe Biden, had warned on Thursday that Avdiivka risked falling to Russian forces because of ammunition shortages following months of Republican congressional opposition to the aid package.
Avdiivka has been pounded by the Russians for months, but it is only in recent weeks that they have been able to make significant breakthroughs, with small groups of advance troops making it into the city itself.
Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from the eastern city of Avdiivka to avoid encirclement, army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has said, marking the biggest change on the frontlines since Russian forces captured Bakhmut in May last year.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, the recently appointed Syrskyi said he had acted to “preserve the lives and health of servicemen”, stabilise the situation and move troops to more favourable defence lines.
“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 in terms of manpower and equipment,” he said. “The life of military personnel is [of] the highest value.”
A day earlier, the Ukrainian commander responsible for forces in the south-east of the country had said Kyiv’s forces had withdrawn from some positions in the town.
“New positions have been prepared and powerful fortifications continue to be prepared, taking into account all possible scenarios,” Oleksandr Tarnavskiy said in a statement on social media on Friday.
In a Saturday statement issued just after Syrskyi’s he added, “In a situation where the enemy is advancing on the corpses of their own soldiers with a ten-to-one shell advantage, under constant bombardment, this [withdrawal] is the only correct solution.”
As the two-year mark of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches, Ukrainian troops are under pressure along the frontline, with depleted and exhausted ranks and a shortage of artillery shells that has been exacerbated by the stalling of a large US funding package.
The US president, Joe Biden, had warned on Thursday that Avdiivka risked falling to Russian forces because of ammunition shortages following months of Republican congressional opposition to the aid package.
Avdiivka has been pounded by the Russians for months, but it is only in recent weeks that they have been able to make significant breakthroughs, with small groups of advance troops making it into the city itself.
Syrskyi, who was appointed last week in a major military shake-up, had sent in reinforcements to aid the defence of Avdiivka, but Tarnavskiy’s announcements had suggested Kyiv might be preparing for a retreat from the city, which was surrounded on three sides by Russian forces.
The loss of the city nearly two years into Russia’s full-scale invasion may give President Volodymyr Zelenskiy a stronger case to make to the west for more urgent military aid as he addresses the Munich Security Conference on Saturday morning.
There was no immediate comment about the withdrawal from the Russian defence ministry, Zelenskiy or the Ukrainian defence minister.
Taking over the remains of Avdiivka, much of which has been decimated by fighting, would give Russia full control of the area surrounding Donetsk, a large Ukrainian city that was seized by Russian proxy forces in 2014. It would also be a symbolic gain for Vladimir Putin as he prepares to stand in a rubber-stamp election next month that will grant him another six years in office.
An industrial city once known for its sprawling coke plant, Avdiivka became a Ukrainian military stronghold after the loss of Donetsk in 2014, but has been decimated by the recent fighting. Vitaliy Barabash, Avdiivka’s mayor, said 923 civilians remained in the city, down from a prewar population of about 32,000. Most of them are elderly people who have refused to leave their homes, even as fighting has intensified in recent months, and there is no possibility to evacuate them.
Fierce battles have been going on around Avdiivka since October. Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade, which had been deployed around Avdiivka to reinforce Kyiv’s troops, said in a statement on Thursday that the situation in the city was “hell”, describing it as “threatening and unstable”.
John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, said in a briefing on Thursday that Avdiivka was at risk of falling under Russian control. “In very large part, this is happening because the Ukrainian forces on the ground are running out of artillery ammunition,” he said.
At a forest base near a section of the frontline in Donetsk region, west of Avdiivka, soldiers from a self-propelled artillery unit that forms part of Ukraine’s First Tank Brigade said during a visit on Thursday that their ability to strike the Russians had been cut dramatically since November.
“Back then, we could fire every half hour, to stop them from relaxing and disrupt their movements, now we have to be very selective, and only fire for defence,” said their commander, who gave his call-sign, Titushko, in accordance with Ukrainian army regulations.
“We cannot target only one vehicle, we only aim when we see a concentration of hardware,” he added.
With the frontlines largely static in recent months, the capture of Avdiivka would mark Russia’s first major gain since taking Bakhmut last May.
“Avdiivka is important for them to control the space around Donetsk, you have control of dominant heights there, and they can build logistics corridors to supply a large area of the front,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskiy, in an interview in Kyiv earlier this month. “This is not about symbolism, this is about the operative importance of a particular territory,” he added.
Some in Ukraine have suggested that the situation in Avdiivka resembles the fierce fighting during last year’s defence of Bakhmut, during which Ukrainian forces suffered heavy losses during an ultimately unsuccessful defence of the city.
“I don’t think Avdiivka is like Bakhmut, but I worry that Ukraine’s leadership will choose to freight it with political significance, which it need not have, as part of an observed tendency to not cede ground anywhere no matter the cost or military reality,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment thinktank.
Zelenskiy fired his top army commander, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, last week, and replaced him with Syrskyi, the former commander of the land forces, citing a need for a new approach.
Some Ukrainian soldiers blame Syrskyi for the losses at Bakhmut and expressed concern that more lives may be lost in Avdiivka before the Russian takeover that most believe is inevitable.
“Most likely we will lose it and the only other option is we spend tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives to hold it a bit longer, and then who will replace those people,” said one Ukrainian army officer, who asked not to be identified.
Avoid encirclemen, well, that’s one way of putting it, but the truth is, the butcher redeployed 3 (I think) battalions and they got badly beat up by the Russians.
While I don’t know this for a fact, and I’ve not heard any major pundit say it, I think we are now moving from the SMO role, to a much more aggressive combat stance.
Some pundits are saying there’s a more aggressive Russian stance, but no one has said the SMO is over, or coming to an end. I believe the appointment of the butcher has enabled more Russian aggression, because this nutjob literally throws away his men. He got his butcher nickname from his own men, so butchering Nazis is exactly what Russia will do.
New sophisticated Russian drones are detecting Nazi movements after a major Russian missile strike. These Nazis head into the strike site, and Russia hits the site again, and sometimes they treble tap. So the Russians hit a Nazi command bunker, full of brass, and even Nazi NATO brass, kill them, and then kill the soldiers, firefighters, and medics who go to help with a 2nd missile.
Think is nasty, maybe, but the Nazis have been hitting town centers, Christmas markets, directly targeting civilians, a war crime, and then double tapping the same target.
These 2nd missiles are going to save the Nazis some bullets, because they won’t need to murder their own wounded rams.
Only problem is your average Ukrainian doesn’t view him/herself as a ‘Russian’. Its a different ethnicity with their own language, which justifies their own nation to be free from the Russian Judeo-Commies. Ukrainians are primarily of Slavo-Germanic stock, while the Russian is generally a Slavo-Mongol mix. Two different breeds & this is the source of the historical animosity between them. A plebiscite should be administered to the Ukrainain population, asking them if they want to be absorbed into neo-Bolshevik Russia. 90+% will say no.
This war was simply a setup by NATO & Russia to slaughter thousands/millions of whites aka ‘Whiteocide’.. The morons can’t figure this out though, falling for the superficial pretexts & bogus motives provided by the same Jew managed MSM (Marxist Semitic Media) of both ‘sides’.
@ Eichmann
The Soros and ZOG power which took over the place in 2014 have done nothing since but corrupt and economically destabilize the nation, and from that time on they have done all they could to stir up the historical hatred between the ethnic differences in the people you mention, and particularly in the 4 oblasts bordering Russia. They are totally responsible for starting the war in the Dombas and all with US and UK direction. They planned this war, and they planned to divide up the nation and reap the spoils.
If you see a nation bankrupted from the top down and the people divided from below through orchestrated cultural clashes, then you are looking at the face of George Soros.
Great post Eichmann. The Commie Russian mongrels hate Ukraine because we fought with the Germans against Judeo-Communism in WWII and represent white ethnocentrism.
. ‘Ukrainians are primarily of Slavo-Germanic stock….’
If the oft-claimed ‘Germanic’ stock had a basis in reality, DNA evidence of it could have been produced long ago. But it wasn’t, so it doesn’t. Indeed, etymology alone gainsays the proposition:
In the word ‘Ukraina’: ‘U” means ‘in’; ‘kraina’ means ‘hinterland’. The word is a geographical demarcation, not an ethnic one. (Putn confirmed this point in the Tucker Carlson interview. )
Fred B/Sophie —
Keep drinking the Commie Kool Aid.