(Reuters) – Ukraine’s armed forces commander General Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Thursday he had ordered defences to be strengthened in the eastern Donetsk region, a day after Kyiv forces announced they had withdrawn from the town of Vuhledar.
Russian troops are steadily inching forward in different sectors in eastern Ukraine despite Kyiv’s surprise incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region in August that it was hoped would slow the advances.
Syrskyi said on social media he was working on “one of the hottest front sectors” with the 25th Sicheslav Airborne Brigade.
He gave no details on the exact location but the brigade operates in the Pokrovsk front, an area of intensified Russian assaults.
“While working in the brigade, I made a number of decisions aimed at strengthening stability and effectiveness of our defence,” Syrskyi said.
More than 2/1-2 years into the full-scale war, Ukrainian troops are on the defensive. The Ukrainian military announced on Wednesday it was pulling troops out of the coal-mining town Vuhledar, a hilltop bastion that had resisted intense attacks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Ukraine’s eastern military command said on Wednesday it had ordered a pullback from Vuhledar to avoid being encircled by Russian troops and to “preserve personnel and military equipment”. Russia has widely used the tactic to secure control of other Ukrainian settlements.
Moscow’s forces now control just under a fifth of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow’s primary tactical goal is to take the whole of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
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 a key target.
In its daily report on the battlefield situation, Ukraine’s General Staff put the number of combat clashes for the last day at 142. Most of them took place on the Pokrovsk front, with 29 reported, and on the Kurakhove front, with 27.
(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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