Russian forces have stepped up their shelling on Avdiivka, a town in eastern Ukraine, according to Ukrainian officials, as Moscow tries to launch a broader offensive against the heavily defended frontline in the region. Donbas region.
While battle for the city of Bakhmut Having become a major focus of Russia’s efforts to secure territory in the region, Avdiivka is one of a number of areas where Moscow is stepping up attacks along the 160-mile crescent-shaped front line to the east. , Ukrainian officials said.
For weeks, Russia has sent tens of thousands of troops into battles in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to push Ukrainians out of fortified positions. The bloodiest fighting has taken place in and around Bakhmut, where both sides are trying to weaken the other in a months-long battle of attrition, but the Ukrainian General Staff regularly reports More than 100 attempts by Russian forces to break through their defenses every day .
Many individual battles involve a lot of main roads and supply lines as well as control of now ravaged towns and villages. The length of the battle for Avdiivka shows how difficult it was for Russian forces to advance further east, where both armies have established important defenses and Ukraine has consolidated its positions.
The Russian military fired two projectiles into an abandoned school in the town on Monday, killing a local woman, according to a post by Andriy Yermak, head of Ukraine’s presidential office, on the messaging app. Telegram social. He posted two photos of a three-story building that had been turned into rubble. The head of Ukraine’s regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, wrote on Telegram that Russian forces also fired three other shells into the town.
There is no independent confirmation of the reports. The town had a population of 31,000 before the war, but most of its inhabitants fled. Mr. Kyrylenko said that Russia also shelled neighboring communities.
Kyrylenko said the Russian attacks included the use of cluster bombs, which rights groups say may disproportionately harm civilians. His account could not be independently verified.
Ukraine’s General Staff said in a daily report that its forces repelled attacks in the town itself as well as in at least five nearby settlements. According to other officials, the attacks constitute a pattern of destruction.
Vitaliy Barabash, the head of Avdiivka’s military junta, said on Ukrainian television over the weekend: “Russia has massively attacked villages near and on the way to the town over the past week.”
“These villages are being wiped out,” Mr. Barabash said. He said Russian forces appear to be “trying to cut off Avdiivka, disrupting logistics, transporting personnel and ammunition”, perhaps in the belief that the town has “a lot of personnel, our people”. He added that Russian warplanes had targeted a road running from a large industrial plant into the town.
Videos and photos from Avdiivka posted on social media in recent weeks show a town devastated by shelling, even by the standards of other hard-hit places in the fighting area. erupted since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago. In one incident, flames burned in an abandoned industrial building, a large crater on a debris-filled street, and dozens of homes and apartment complexes had their windows blown out. Even the trees were burned black. The documents have not been independently verified.
Pro-Russian separatists held Avdiivka for several months in 2014, when Moscow illegally annexed Crimea and established breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, the two provinces that make up the Donbas. Ukrainian forces drove the separatists out of Avdiivka in July of that year.
Over the weekend, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group, reported a Russian statement that Moscow’s forces had captured Sjeverne and Kamianka, settlements to the east and west. by Avdiivka. The Ukrainian military denies the claims and has no independent confirmation.
