A building damaged by a Russian military strike in the city of Vuhledar, Ukraine, in a Feb. 18, 2023, file photo.STRINGER/Reuters
Russian troops on Wednesday took charge of the eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar, a bastion that had resisted intense attacks since Russia launched its full-scale assault in 2022.
The advance of Moscow’s forces, which control just under a fifth of Ukraine, has underlined Russia’s vast superiority in men and materiel as Ukraine pleads for more weapons from the Western allies that have been supporting it.
Ukraine’s eastern military command said it had ordered a pullback from the hilltop coal mining town to avoid encirclement by Russian troops and “preserve personnel and military equipment”.
The Russian defence ministry did not mention Vuhledar in its daily battlefield report.
Russian Telegram channels, however, published video of troops waving the Russian tricolour flag over shattered buildings.
The town, which had a population of over 14,000 before the war, has been devastated, with Soviet-era apartment buildings smashed apart and scarred.
The Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said the last Ukrainian forces from the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, a unit famous for its resistance, had abandoned the town late on Tuesday.
President Vladimir Putin has said Russia’s primary tactical goal is to take the whole of the Donbas region – the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk – in southeastern Ukraine.
Russia controls about 80 per cent of the Donbas, a heavy industry hub where the conflict began in 2014 when Moscow supported pro-Russian separatist forces after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Kyiv and Moscow seized Crimea from Ukraine.
Since Russia sent its army into Ukraine in February 2022, the war has largely been a story of grinding artillery and drone strikes along a heavily fortified 1,000-km (620-mile) front involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
But in August the battlefield became much more dynamic: Ukraine smashed through the border in Russia’s Kursk region in a bid to divert Russian forces, and Russian troops began advancing faster than before in eastern Ukraine.
Russian forces have been pushing westwards at key points along some 150 km (95 miles) of the front in the Donetsk region, with the logistics hub of Pokrovsk also a key target.
They captured Ukrainsk on Sept. 17 and then began encircling Vuhledar, about 80 km (50 miles) south of Pokrovsk.
Russia has been using pincer tactics to trap and then constrict Ukrainian strongholds. Images from the area showed intense bombardment of the town with artillery and aerial glide bombs.
Neither side discloses losses, and each said the other had paid a high human price for the town.
Control of Vuhledar, which lies at the intersection of the eastern and southern battlefields, is significant because it will ease Russia’s advance as it tries to pierce deeper behind the Ukrainian defensive lines.
Russian bloggers said Russia could now try to push towards Velyka Novosilka, just over 30 km (20 miles) to the west.
Vuhledar also sits close to a railway line connecting Crimea to the Donbas region.
Russian forces currently control 98.5 per cent of the Luhansk region and 60 per cent of the Donetsk region.