Ukraine shut the eastern town of Avdiivka to non-military personnel yesterday, describing it as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, as Kyiv seeks to break the back of Russia’s flagging winter offensive before a counter-assault of its own.
A top Ukrainian general said Kyiv was planning its next move after Moscow appeared to shift focus from the small city of Bakhmut, which Russia has failed to capture after half a year of the war’s bloodiest fighting, to Avdiivka further south.
Front lines in Ukraine have barely budged for more than four months despite a Russian winter offensive using hundreds of thousands of freshly called-up reservists and convicts recruited as mercenaries from jail. The Ukrainian military aims to wear down Russian forces before a counter-offensive in coming weeks or months.
Ukrainian ground forces commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who said last week that the counter-attack could come ‘very soon’, visited front line troops in the east and said his forces were still repelling Russian attacks on Bakhmut.
Defending the small city in the industrialised Donbas region that Russia has tried to seize for months was a ‘military necessity’, said Syrskyi, praising Ukrainian resilience in ‘extremely difficult conditions’.
“We are calculating all possible options for the development of events, and will react adequately to the current situation”.
Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zaluzhniy said on Saturday the situation was being ‘stabilised’ around Bakhmut, where Russian forces say they are fighting street by street.
Last week, the Ukrainian military warned that Avdiivka, a smaller town 90km further south, could become a ‘second Bakhmut’ as Russia turns its attention there. Both towns have been reduced to rubble in fighting that both sides have called a ‘meat grinder’.
“I am sad to say this, but Avdiivka is becoming more and more like a place from post-apocalyptic movies,” said Vitaliy Barabash, head of the city’s military administration. Only around 2,000 of a pre-war population of 30,000 remain and he urged them to leave.
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