KYIV, Feb 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Ukraine says its troops have withdrawn from Avdiivka – a key eastern town besieged by Russian forces for months.
The decision was taken in order to save the soldiers’ lives, said President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Almost all of Avdiivka’s pre-war population of more than 30,000 people have left and the city itself is almost completely destroyed.
Its fall marks Russia’s biggest win for months and Zelensky blamed faltering Western weapons supplies.
Ukraine has been experiencing shortages in ammunition, mainly as a result of political squabbling in the US, its main supplier.
Speaking at the Munich security conference on Saturday, Zelensky urged Western countries to help Ukraine defeat “the monster” – as he called President Vladimir Putin.
The Russian leader will make the next few years “catastrophic” for many more countries like Ukraine if the Western world does not stand up to him, he warned.
Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb 24, 2022.
Avdiivka has been engulfed in fierce fighting for months and has been a battlefield town since 2014, when Russian-backed fighters seized large swathes of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The fall of Avdiivka marks the biggest change on the more than 1,000km-long front line since Russian troops seized the nearby town of Bakhmut in May 2023.
Ukraine is critically dependent on weapons supplies from the US and other Western allies to keep fighting Russia – a much bigger military force with an abundance of artillery ammunition. — NNN-AGENCIES
