Russia has taken over a new city in eastern Ukraine. This is Vuhledar, a town that kyiv troops have defended tooth and nail during the more than two years that Vladimir Putin’s forces have been trying to capture it.
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The Ukrainian Army made public this Wednesday that it had ordered its last forces to withdraw from this town in the Donetsk region, now in ruins, to avoid being surrounded. “The higher command authorized a maneuver to withdraw units from Vuhledar in order to preserve military personnel and equipment, and occupy a position for new operations,” the Kórtitsia group, a unit of the ground forces, said in a statement. “As a result of the enemy’s actions, there was a threat of the city being surrounded.”
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, defended this Thursday the decision of the Ukrainian military, which he described as “absolutely correct.” “Lives are more important than any building,” he said during a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in kyiv.
A defensive bastion
Vuhledar was a defensive stronghold of Ukrainian forces. It is a mining town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, with a pre-war population of about 14,000. According to the regional governor, as of Tuesday, 107 civilians remained in the city. All the children, he said, had been evacuated.
Local authorities confirmed that Russian troops entered Vuhledar and had almost reached the center on October 1, but added that fighting was continuing, making it almost impossible to bring humanitarian aid. The governor of Donetsk, Vadym Filashkin, had acknowledged that the situation was “extremely difficult” while videos of Russian soldiers waving their country’s flag on the roof of a building in the city flourished on social media.
In this last assault, Russian forces had gradually surrounded the city, eventually forcing the Ukrainian retreat. Month after month, the constant attacks eventually eroded the defenses. “The main tactic (of the Russians) was to surround us on the flanks, and they did this constantly for six or seven months with constant air attacks; Due to this tactic they managed to exhaust our resources, because we do not have as many as they do,” Arsenii Prylipka, press officer of the 72nd Brigade, which defended the town, told the Associated Press agency.
The situation became critical when the Russian troops entered the city and the Ukrainian units began to withdraw without waiting for the order to withdraw, reports the BBC, which reports that there is anger among those who managed to leave with their commanders for not having ordered the withdrawal earlier. fold.
Resisted numerous attacks
The truth is that Russia has long had Vuhledar in its sights and has launched numerous attacks to capture it. In 2022 and 2023 he attempted several offensives, but they were repelled by Zelensky’s units. Western experts believe that Moscow suffered considerable losses in personnel and equipment in them. The intense fighting has left much of the city devastated. The images show buildings and structures reduced to rubble and blackened, reminiscent of other Ukrainian cities devastated by the Russian offensive.
So far, the Russian onslaught had been unsuccessful. “The Battle of Vuhledar was extremely slow and costly for the Russians. The Ukrainians managed to hold on to the city for more than two and a half years. When the situation on the flanks became too difficult, the Ukrainians were able to execute an apparently successful withdrawal,” Emil Kastehelmi, an open source intelligence analyst and expert in military history, wrote a few days ago on the social network X.
The fall of Vuhledar is a reflection of the difficult situation in Ukraine after more than two and a half years of war in which Moscow has the advantage in weapons and troops. It is the last large town that has been lost after the offensive that Russia has maintained this summer along the eastern front in which kyiv has been giving up territory. Putin has declared that his main objective is to take over the entire Donbas region – made up of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
Vuhledar, which means “gift of coal,” has tactical importance. It is a fortified area, located on relatively high ground – from there, Ukrainian soldiers could observe the approaching Russian forces from a distance – and at the intersection of the eastern and southern battle fronts.
A prominent Russian war blogger, Boris Rozhin, echoed a message from another channel praising what he calls an “operational, if not operational-strategic” victory due to the geographical position of Vuhledar. “The fact is that this ‘balcony’ [seguramente en referencia a la posición elevada de Vuhledar] “It was located at the junction of the Zaporizhia and Donetsk fronts, which represented a constant threat to the group that covered the approaches to Mariupol,” he says, alluding to the city in southeastern Ukraine that fell into the hands of Putin in 2022 after an offensive. which left thousands of civilians dead and injured and caused enormous destruction. Another pro-Kremlin military blogger Kotsnews presented Vuhledar as “the last Ukrainian city south of Donetsk” that underpins “the entire Ukrainian defense” in the west of the region.
And now what
There are doubts among analysts about whether Russian forces will be able to continue to penetrate Ukrainian terrain quickly and make significant advances at this time, taking into account Ukrainian defensive positions.
In September, Federico Borsari, a researcher at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told the Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Independent that the loss of Vuhledar could “threaten the security of the entire southwestern part of the Donetsk region that is not yet occupied.”
There are those who believe that after Vuhledar the Russians will concentrate in a town further north, Kurájove, which is in turn located around 30 kilometers from Pokrovsk, a city of strategic importance for the logistics of the Ukrainian Army in the region to which that Russian forces have managed to approach. To support their Pokrovsk offensive, Russian forces would now have to maneuver across 30 kilometers of open terrain.
Kastehelmi maintains that the capture of Vuhledar “does not provide the Russians with any immediate benefit or avenues of approach to Kurájove” and indicates that between the two towns there is a distance of more than 20 kilometers and many fortifications. “The strongest positions are located just south of Kurájove. However, I am not sure about the quality of the fortifications in the general Vuhledar-Kurájove area. Usefulness in battle depends on the level of preparation. At least there should have been enough time to build them properly,” says the analyst.
Experts from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a think tank Washington-based experts believe that the Russian seizure of Vuhledar is unlikely to “fundamentally alter the course of offensive operations” in the western Donetsk region, largely because, they say, “it is not a particularly crucial logistical node.” and because Putin’s forces have controlled most of the main roads leading to Vuhledar before its capture, “which means that Russian forces have already had the ability to intercept Ukrainian logistics on this part of the front to some extent.” .
In the opinion of these researchers, the capture of the town will not necessarily provide Russian forces with “an advantageous position from which to launch subsequent offensive operations” in other places in western Donbas and they point out that the maneuvers of Moscow’s forces can also be seen affected by the beginning of the autumn rains, which would make it difficult for them to advance through the mainly rural and agricultural terrain that surrounds the town, as it becomes much muddier.
