Ukraine withdrew troops from the besieged eastern stronghold of Avdiivka to save the lives of its soldiers, Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said yesterday, handing Russia its biggest symbolic victory since May.
The pullback comes after Russian forces stepped up efforts to capture the eastern industrial hub in October last year, leading to mass casualties and destruction.
Facing ammunition shortages and outnumbered on the battlefield, Ukrainian forces announced that they had withdrawn in the early hours yesterday.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“The ability to save our people is the most important task for us,” Zelenskiy told the Munich Security Conference in Germany, explaining the move.
“In order to avoid being surrounded, it was decided to withdraw to other lines. This does not mean that people retreated some kilometers and Russia captured something, it did not capture anything,” he said.
This echoed earlier statements from newly appointed Ukranian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky, who said he “decided to withdraw our units from the city and switch to defense on more favorable lines.”
“The life of military personnel is the highest value,” Syrksy said.
It was Syrsky’s first major decision since his appointment, as Ukraine faces mounting pressure in the east because of ammunition shortages, with a US$60 billion US military aid package held up in Washington.
Ukrainian General Oleksandr Tarnavsky, commander of forces in the Avdiivka area, supported the move, saying Russian troops were “advancing over the corpses of their own soldiers with a 10-to-one shelling advantage.”
During a speech at the security conference, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz raised pressure on European allies to increase military aid to Ukraine, warning of the political and financial cost of a Russian victory.
Scholz told delegates that Germany’s military assistance for Kyiv amounts to about 28 billion euros (US$30 billion) and called on “all EU capitals” to make “similar decisions.” He said he was “urgently campaigning” for this in Munich, while acknowledging that budget constraints complicate the situation and the war “in the middle of Europe is also taking its toll on us.”
Zelenskiy spoke directly after Scholz.
He said it would be “a catastrophe” if Russia’s full-scale invasion was not stopped this year.
The Ukrainian leader arrived in Munich after signing separate long-term security deals with Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron amid a worsening artillery shortage for Kyiv.
In Berlin on Friday, Scholz announced a package of air-defense and artillery systems for Ukraine worth about 1.1 billion euros.
In Paris later in the day, Macron pledged additional assistance worth as much as 3 billion euros for this year.
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