KIEV/MUNICH (dpa-AFX) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj has assessed the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the small town of Avdiivka after months of heavy fighting as a “logical, fair and professional solution” to protect the lives of the soldiers. “That was the main task for us, we protect our people, our soldiers,” said Zelenskyj on Saturday at the security conference in Munich about his military’s previous decision to abandon the city in eastern Ukraine. In order to protect the soldiers from being surrounded, they were taken back to new defensive lines.
The new Ukrainian commander-in-chief Olexander Syrskyj announced the order to withdraw from Avdiivka early on Saturday morning. “Given the operational situation around Avdiivka, I decided to withdraw our units from the city and go into defense on more favorable lines in order to avoid encirclement and protect the life and health of soldiers,” he wrote on the X platform (formerly Twitter). But the army doesn’t want to give up the city. They will return, he wrote.
The Russian military initially did not comment on the changed front situation near Avdiivka. Russian troops have been trying to capture Avdiivka since October 2023 with heavy losses. Since 2014, the former industrial city has been an outpost of Ukraine in the immediate vicinity of Donetsk, the Russian-controlled capital of the Donbass coal and steel district. In the past few days, the situation of the Ukrainian defenders there had become increasingly difficult./cha/DP/zb