There was no other Bakhmut. The Ukrainian army withdrew from the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka on Friday night to avoid further casualties, handing Russia its most symbolic and important victory since the failure of the counteroffensive launched by Kyiv in the summer.
Avdiivka is a ghost town. It was an industrial city of 34,000 inhabitants, but now they don’t reach a thousand. Its military value is significant. Its control by Kyiv made it easier for Ukrainian artillery to bomb the city of Donetsk, one of the urban centers controlled by the Russians and the capital of the separatist region for ten years. From now on, the city’s inhabitants will be able to breathe a little easier. In addition, its conquest will allow Russia to attack other cities in the Donbass.
The value of Avdíivka is also symbolic. It is a city on which the Russian army (with commands very little concerned about the wear and tear of the troops) has launched waves of soldiers since October to conquer it on a date as marked as this, on the eve of two years since the beginning of the war.
Avdiivka briefly fell to Moscow-led pro-Russian separatists in July 2014, but returned to Ukrainian control and had been so for years despite its proximity to Donetsk.
Ukrainian commanders made the decision to withdraw after realizing that they were outnumbered and did not have enough ammunition to avoid carnage (those familiar with the situation on the ground note that the difference between the Russians and Ukrainians in terms of armament is five to one).
It was “a fair decision” to “save as many lives as possible”, declared President Volodymyr Zelensky to the corridors of the Munich Conference on Saturday. “To avoid being surrounded, they have decided to fall back on new lines. This does not mean that we have moved back a few kilometers and that Russia has captured something, they have captured nothing” pointed out the visibly upset Ukrainian.
“In a situation in which the enemy advances marching over the corpses of his soldiers and with ten times more shells, […] is the only good decision possible”, wrote in a Telegram message the commander of the Ukrainian army in the area, Oleksandr Tarnavski, on Friday night.
The withdrawal of this eastern Ukrainian city is the first major decision of the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Oleksandr Sirski, after he was appointed on February 8 to replace Valery Zalujni, and it is a significant one.
Sirski has a reputation for being tough. Unlike his predecessor, he is not a popular man among the soldiers. It cannot be said that the human factor is important when making strategic decisions. For this reason, the first thing Sirski did as soon as he took office was to send a refreshment unit from Kyiv to Avdiivka. Everything suggested that the Ukrainian army would reissue the Numantian defense (and ultimately useless and very costly in casualties) of Bakhmut. This was also supposed to be Zelenskiy’s wish.
But the reality has advised the withdrawal, as well as the vox populi opinion among the soldiers and the population of the capital, who consider that Bakhmut was not a good deal for the Ukrainians. It may have kept the Russian troops entertained and inflicted heavy casualties on them, but Kyiv lost some of its best troops in that battle, which were then unable to be used in the failed July 2023 counteroffensive.
Bakhmut was conquered in May 2023 after ten months of fighting and at the cost of thousands of dead and wounded.
“I have decided to withdraw our units from the city and start defending ourselves from more favorable lines,” wrote Sirski on Facebook. “Our soldiers have fulfilled their military duties with dignity and have done everything they could to destroy the best Russian military units and inflict significant losses on the enemy,” he continues.
Before making the abandonment of the city official, General Tarnavski acknowledged that “several Ukrainian soldiers” had been “captured” by the Russians, who were far superior in “artillery and aviation”.
A senior military commander who wished to remain anonymous told the AFP agency that “it was the right decision, we had neither weapons nor artillery and, if we do not save the lives of our soldiers, we will soon have no people to fight with in the front”.
However, the soldiers’ messages on the networks indicate otherwise. They point out that the decision could have been made much earlier and that this would have prevented the loss of more men. The networks have also talked about the chaos of the last few hours in the Ukrainian army.
The fall of Avdiivka came at a time when President Zelenski was touring the two major European capitals (Paris and Berlin) to try to strengthen European support for the war.
In Munich, Zelenski could feel the reception of the words of high European leaders and also of the United States. However, his most serious problem is on the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States, where Republicans in Congress are keeping military aid to Ukraine blocked in a decision to which Donald Trump is no stranger. The former president considers that the unblocking of aid means a victory for Joe Biden in the race they are running for the White House.
Military experts have pointed out that what happened in Avdíivka is a first symptom of the lack of weaponry of the Ukrainian army. In addition, they point out that when the effects of the lack of weapons are felt on other war fronts, particularly in the Kharkiv area, it will be too late to change the course of the war.
