UKRAINE SURRENDERS A STRONGHOLD

Fierce Russian attack left defenders at risk of being trapped in city

The New York Times (International Edition) · 19 Feb 2024 · BY CARLOTTA GALL, MARC SANTORA AND
CONSTANT MÉHEUT Carlotta Gall reported from Kharkiv; Marc Santora from Kyiv, Ukraine; and Constant
Méheut from Paris. Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Kharkiv, and Malachy Browne from Limer-
ick, Ireland.

The city of Avdiivka had rebu!ed fierce attacks, but troops were at risk of
encirclement.

Ukraine has ordered the complete withdrawal from the decimated city of
Avdiivka, surrendering a position that had been a military stronghold for the bet-
ter part of a decade, in the face of withering Russian assault.
“Based on the operational situation around Avdiivka, in order to avoid
encirclement and preserve the lives and health of servicemen, I decided to with-
draw our units from the city and move to defense on more favorable lines,” Gen.
Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top military commander, said in a statement.
The fall of Avdiivka, a city that was once home to some 30,000 people but is now a
smoking ruin, is the first major gain Russian forces have achieved since May of
last year. After rebu"ng a Ukrainian countero!ensive in the summer and fall,
Russian forces in recent weeks have been pressing the attack across nearly the
entire length of the 600-mile-long (thousand-kilometer) front.

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The Ukrainian withdrawal on Saturday follows a bloody endgame with some of
the fiercest fighting of the twoyear war. Relying on its superiority in personnel
and weaponry, Russia pounded the city with aerial bombardments and ground
assaults, though its fighters su!ered a staggering number of casualties.
Outgunned Ukrainian forces had begun withdrawing from positions in the south-
ern part of the city on Wednesday, and since then have been engaged in a desper-
ate battle to avoid encirclement inside the city as Russian forces advanced from
multiple directions. As Russian bombers pummeled Avdiivka, Ukraine said its
forces had shot down three Russian warplanes.
Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the head of Ukraine’s forces in the south, said there had
been no choice but to withdraw, given the Russian advantage in firepower and the
number of soldiers Russia was willing to throw into the 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 bombardment, this is the only
correct solution,” he said in a statement.
The commander said that there were losses for the Ukrainians and “at the final
stage of the operation, under pressure from the superior forces of the enemy,
some Ukrainian servicemen fell into captivity.”
Even if Ukrainian lines stabilize in the rear of Avdiivka, the city’s fall into Russian
control will allow Moscow’s military to move its troops and equipment more e"-
ciently as it presses in other directions.
“Avdiivka is a very important strong point in the Ukrainian system of defense,”
because it protects Pokrovsk, about 30 miles to the northwest, a logistical hub for
the Ukrainian Army, Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at the National Insti-
tute for Strategic Studies in Ukraine, said in an interview.
“Taking control of Avdiivka might create an opening for Russia,” he said.
He added, however, that Russian forces lacked large reserves of troops and
equipment and were unlikely to be able to push farther west of Avdiivka quickly
and turn the recent success into a major victory.
Soldiers reached by phone on Friday, who asked not to be identified, given the
military action, described a harrowing bid to escape the city. They gave accounts
of racing past blasted-out buildings as shells thundered from all around and Rus-
sians pressed in from several directions.
“In one of the sectors in the town, fighters from the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade
find themselves completely surrounded, but they are attempting to break
through, and they succeed,” Maj. Rodion Kudryashov, deputy commander of the

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assault brigade, said in an interview with Radio Liberty.
Some expressed concern privately in interviews that the call to withdraw had
come too late, or posted stark accounts on social media of their dangerous and
chaotic retreat.
Viktor Biliak of the 110th Brigade, which has been defending the city for the past
two years, described his evacuation on Thursday of the garrison known as Zenit,
in a southern pocket of the city.
Mr. Biliak, who uses the call sign Hentai, said his unit had been left no time for an
orderly exit — neither to evacuate weapons and equipment, nor to burn papers
and lay mines in the way of attacking Russian troops.
Ten men made a failed attempt to leave on Wednesday night, he said. They had to
fight their way forward in a gun battle, but then came under artillery fire.
“Only three wounded made it back,” Hentai wrote on Instagram. He helped res-
cue one of the wounded men the next morning, he said, a dangerous movement
in daylight that cost the unit four more wounded, including himself.
The troops made another attempt Thursday night, and the severely wounded
were told to wait for an armored vehicle to take them.
“Groups were leaving, one after the other,” Hentai wrote. Still able to walk, he
decided not to wait for the evacuation vehicle and led a group out.
“There was zero visibility outside. It was just plain survival. A kilometer across
the field,” he wrote. “A bunch of blind cats led by a drone. Enemy artillery. The
road to Avdiivka is littered with our corpses.”
The evacuation vehicle never came for the wounded, he said. The last group left
the bunker, and he overheard a wounded soldier asking over the radio about 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,” Hentai wrote. “This dia-
logue on the radio wounded us to our very core.”
His and other accounts could not be independently confirmed, but the soldiers
cited in this article are known to be members of the Ukrainian military with a
public presence on social media, and the locations of landscapes shown in videos
were verified as being in Avdiivka by The New York Times.
As the battle for Avdiivka intensified, Ukrainian commanders fighting in the area
were forced to ration ammunition, soldiers said. White House o"cials have
seized on similar accounts to assert that the failure to pass a $60 billion renewed
military aid package in Congress was directly undermining the Ukrainians’ fight

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on the ground.
The Ukrainian government is also struggling to recruit and mobilize soldiers to
fill its depleted ranks after two years of often brutal fighting.
Avdiivka and the surrounding communities have been on the front line ever since
Russian-backed militants seized territory in eastern Ukraine in 2014, but the
Russians stepped up their e!orts to take the city in October, launching large-
scale assaults to broadly encircle the area.
Those attempts largely failed and resulted in some of the heaviest Russian losses
of the war, with tens of thousands of its soldiers killed and wounded, according to
the Ukrainian military as well as British and American o"cials.
Early this year, the Russians managed to break into the city of Avdiivka itself, at
which point Ukrainian losses started to increase significantly. At the same time,
Russia stepped up bombardment of the city, seeking to smash heavily fortified
Ukrainian defenses.
As the situation turned increasingly dire, military analysts inside and outside
Ukraine worried that the leadership would hold on after it was clear that hope was
lost and unnecessarily expend personnel and weapons.
The Ukrainian military command said the withdrawal from the southern part of
Avdiivka had been conducted with “minor losses.” But soldiers posting videos on
social media provided a window into how dangerous movement in the area had
become. In one video, several Ukrainian soldiers ride atop an armored vehicle just
half a mile from the Avdiivka Coke Chemical Plant on the northwestern edge of
the city, a landmark.
They drive past the sign “Avdiivka is Ukraine” 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 shells land just yards
from them.
On Friday, the commander of the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the Third Assault
Brigade said that the Russians had used incendiary munitions to ignite tanks
storing hazardous fuel at the coke plant.
Volodymyr Furayev, a soldier posted at the sprawling Soviet-era industrial plant,
said that his unit had been ordered to evacuate.
“Leaving the coke plant,” Mr. Furayev said in one post on TikTok. “Everything is
being targeted. Hard to know where we’re going. Hello to everyone who knows
me. I don’t know if we’ll make it out.”
“In a situation where the enemy is advancing on the corpses of their own soldiers

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with a 10-to-1 shell advantage.”

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