One Ukrainian brigade defended the same block of industrial buildings for months without a break. The other brigade had been in Avdiivka for almost the entire two years of the war, completely exhausted but without replacements, AP News reports.
Ammunition was running low, and the Russians were launching dozens of airstrikes daily, using “floating bombs” to destroy even fortified positions.
Russian soldiers came in waves: first lightly armed to force the Ukrainian defenders to waste precious ammunition, then well-trained soldiers. Sometimes there were ambushes involving special forces or saboteurs popping out of tunnels.
When morale waned, the battalion commander, who had hundreds of men under his command, disappeared under unclear circumstances, according to law enforcement documents seen by The Associated Press. One of the soldiers with him was found dead. The commander and another soldier with him have not been seen since.
Within a week, Ukraine lost Avdiivka, a town in the Donetsk region that it had been defending long before the conflict began in February 2022. Nearly surrounded and vastly outnumbered, the Ukrainians decided to retreat and avoid the same deadly siege that soldiers endured in the port city of Mariupol, according to AP News.
The Associated Press interviewed 10 Ukrainian soldiers to reconstruct a picture of how dwindling ammunition, overwhelming Russian numbers and military mismanagement led to Ukraine’s worst defeat in a year. The same problems pose risks to Ukraine’s immediate future. Viktor Biliak, an infantryman with the 110th Brigade who had been in the area since March 2022, said:
We weren’t so much physically exhausted as psychologically, being chained to that place.
The fighters joked grimly that the only way out was to die, get wounded or go to prison”.
His unit was on the southern outskirts of Avdiivka, at a well-fortified position called Zenit, which had been on the front line since the start of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Normally, fighters would dig fortifications, but according to Biliak, there was constant gunfire and no power or equipment other than hand shovels.
Judging from pictures posted on the social media accounts of various brigades, some of their trenches barely deserved the name – a little more than knee deep. This meant that when the soldiers retreated, nowhere was safe, AP News reports.
A soldier named Oleh arrived at the 47th Brigade in mid-October. He said the poorly trained Russian infantry, dressed in new uniforms and marching in rows, were an easy target. Ukrainian equipment worked and there was enough ammunition to return fire.
Russians were easy to capture, and some, according to their documents, had not served more than a month. Oleh, who like most Ukrainian soldiers asked to be identified by only his first name or nom de guerre, said:
They don’t know where they’re going, and when they’re asked what their job was, they usually said that they were supposed to take shelter in a basement and wait for the next forces.
But by the end of November, during a major Russian offensive, the Ukrainians realised that something had changed: the skies were filled with glide bombs, huge Soviet-era unguided weapons equipped with navigation guidance systems that destroyed everything around them, and explosive motion-sensing drones that could infiltrate buildings and prey on personnel.
As ammunition stocks were running low, the Ukrainians fought back with whatever calibre of ammunition remained in the depots. According to the men, for every shell they fired, the Russians fired eight or nine. Oleh said:
When you have different types of shells, they have different trajectories, and you have to calculate where they will fly, where they will hit. This is a kind of chaos. And the longer it went, the more we got this stew of shells for all kinds of weapons.
Ukrainian soldiers began to think about retreating. There were no reinforcements, no ammunition and no change in orders. Hundreds of Ukrainian military withdrew to the Avdiivka coke plant after repeated Russian offensives last autumn.
Its 10-kilometre (6-mile) perimeter is surrounded by a vast array of buildings, staircases, chimneys, railway tracks and above-ground pipelines. The roughly rectangular Soviet-era site was surrounded by open fields on three sides and a neighbourhood of weekend cottages on the fourth. In other words, an almost perfect defence position, according to AP News.
They tried not to think of the infamous last stand at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, one of the coke company’s main customers before the war and the place where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or captured. But as the new year began, even the coke plant felt vulnerable. Planer bombs began exploding by the dozens every day.
Holding the flank across the fields to the north, Oleh once counted 74 airstrikes in a single shift. Olexander, the commander of a company of the Presidential Brigade on the factory grounds, says the psychological effect was horrific. He said:
Everyone is used to artillery, but the aerial bombs are something new, and we are not used to them. Their destructive power is many times greater. The effect on the psyche is also greater.
Ukrainian brigades try to withdraw from their immediate forward positions after a few days or at most a week. And brigades engaged in prolonged combat operations should be pulled back so that they can replace the dead or wounded, rest their nerves and resupply. This did not happen in Avdiivka.
The 110th Brigade had been fighting there since March 2022, and the 2nd Battalion of the Presidential Brigade since March 2023. The 47th brigade arrived in mid-October.
As officials in Kyiv wrangled over the sensitive issue of expanding the draft, many soldiers in the east felt ignored by Western allies who no longer send weapons, their high command and fellow Ukrainians.
Russian special forces began appearing seemingly out of nowhere, opening fire on Ukrainians, and then disappearing again. The Russians emerged from the sewers behind the Ukrainian lines and captured the commander before the stunned soldiers could react. Those retreated to Biliak’s position, on Avdiivka’s southern flank, AP News reports.
The soldiers at the coke plant faced similar problems, having learnt to defend themselves against surprises emerging from the network of tunnels and from countless, overwhelming frontal attacks. Maksym, a soldier in the Presidential Brigade, said:
They just kept throwing themselves at the coke plant, leaving piles of their corpses there. Mountains of bodies and heaps of smashed equipment. And every time, they took the same route, we hit them and hit them, and ultimately held our ground.
But the Russians had a seemingly endless supply of men and ammunition, and they were not afraid to waste it. Against the backdrop of incessant airstrikes and advancing Russian infantry, the Ukrainian fighters saw their options narrowing with each road taken by the enemy. According to Oleh, the constant pressure and lack of help led to talk of retreat. He said:
Their constant assaults exhausted us.
The 3rd Assault Brigade arrived at the beginning of the second week of February with orders to go directly to the coke plant. This volunteer brigade became famous for victories against all odds. By the time the experienced fighters reached the plant, the Russian troops had practically closed a wide pincer around it. By then, the defences had been partially destroyed, and the enemy seemed to be everywhere.
On 8 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the country’s military chief, General Valery Zaluzhny. It was the biggest reshuffle in the army since the start of the war.
The next day near Avdiivka, officers fighting to save the city gathered at a command post a few kilometres from the coke plant. A heated discussion took place there, after which the commander and two soldiers left together in a car, according to documents seen by the AP. What happened next is unclear at a time when emotions were running high and Russian saboteurs were appearing behind Ukrainian lines.
Authorities do not believe the missing officer was carrying classified information or military equipment when he disappeared with two others. One of the soldiers was found dead nearby from gunshot wounds. The commander and another man remain missing. AP is withholding their names so as not to endanger those who might be captured.
On 15 February, Biliak received orders for the 110th Brigade to retreat overnight from its position on the southern flank of Avdiivka. He was instructed to withdraw as part of the fourth group. The first group was almost immediately ambushed.
The second group was ambushed and turned back. Having received light shrapnel wounds, Bilyak and other fighters split into small groups and moved into the darkness. He stood at the same crossroads, south of Avdiivka, for just under two years. He said:
It would have been joyful if it had happened earlier. We were always ready to drop everything and flee from there because we had known for a long time that the end was coming. But then we already knew it was too late, and it was out of desperation.
He was making his way on foot, a fresh bandage on his face. Only his night-vision goggles allowed him to find his way to safety, he said.
But they also showed pure horror: people who fell into bomb craters and broke their legs as they retreated. Others were torn apart by shrapnel and told to wait for a car to evacuate them, including one man who called his sister as he lay wounded in the dark with four other men, according to her recording of the conversation. No one was able to reach them.
The next day, the men were still alive, but during another call home, the family heard the voice of Russian soldiers saying, “Get up, get out, we won’t carry you.” All five were later identified by the 110th Brigade as dead, according to AP News.
The 3rd Assault Brigade received the command to retreat a day after the 110th Brigade. It was orderly but hasty.
Air reconnaissance had folded their drones and stowed them in rucksacks. They smashed everything they couldn’t carry to keep the equipment out of Russian hands and squeezed into armoured personnel carriers like sardines, says Lypen, a drone operator in the brigade.
The Ukrainian troops knew the Russians were eavesdropping on their radio conversations, so they communicated face-to-face whenever possible. By 5 a.m., only a few lorries remained at the coke plant, where more than 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been stationed the day before.
On 17 February, Russia took control of Avdiivka and its coke plant. The Ukrainian military said that the vast majority of soldiers who retreated from Avdiivka got out of there safely, while Russian losses were much higher.
On 29 February, Ukraine’s new military chief, Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi, issued a statement stressing the importance of experienced and determined commanders. According to him, an inspection of troops in Donetsk region showed that some commanders “made certain miscalculations in mastering the situation and assessing the enemy, which directly affected the stability of defence in certain areas.”
Many fighters are worried about what the loss of Avdiivka means for Ukraine’s future. There is no time to lose. Andrii, who had fought in Avdiivka for the 110th Brigade since 2022, said:
I try not to feel a sense of despair, of betrayal. The war is still here. We need to recover and keep moving.
