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Russia appears to have finally captured Vuhledar, a key frontline city in eastern Ukraine.
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The city has been under attack since the start of the war, with heavy fighting starting in January 2023.
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The city’s strategic location could give Russia a boost – after at least eighteen months of fighting.
Russia appears to have gained control of a key Ukrainian frontline city, military experts said, as the city’s governor described the difficult situation for Ukraine there.
Citing open sources and pro-Russian military bloggers, the Institute for the Study of War said that as of Tuesday, “Russian forces have likely seized Vuhledar.”
Russian troops have been seen moving freely through the city and planting flags there, the ISW reported.
Vuhledar Governor Vadym Filashkin told Ukrainian television on Tuesday that the situation in the city was “extremely difficult” and that “the enemy has already almost reached the center of the city,” the Kyiv Post reported.
One hundred and seven of the city’s citizens – out of a pre-war population of about 14,000 – remained, Filashkin said.
Russia has been seriously fighting to capture Vuhledar, a small mining town in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, since January 2023.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian army’s general staff made no mention of the city in its daily update of where fighting took place.
Crowdsourced monitoring website DeepState showed that Vuhledar was surrounded on three sides by Russian forces as of Monday.
On Tuesday, the map shows that the city is completely under Russian control.
Unable to easily resupply from any direction, Ukrainian soldiers likely became trapped before being bombarded with glide bombs, Reuters reported.
Vuhledar has been the target of aerial bombardment from the start of the war and was hit by Russian cluster munitions on February 24, 2022, according to Human Rights Watch.
Since then, Russia has made several sustained attempts to take the city. A major attack began in January 2023, at the cost of thousands of soldiers, Politico reported last year, citing the Ukrainian military.
The fighting tore apart much of Russia’s 155th Marine Infantry Brigade, considered one of the country’s best.
A further attack took place in June, with Russia securing a number of claims in nearby towns last month.
How strategically important the capture of Vuhledar will prove to be remains to be seen.
As a long-fought hotspot, Vuhledar has built a reputation as a “fortress” in the Ukrainian military, and its loss will likely be a morale blow, the Kiev Independent reported.
The resulting morale boost for Russia is likely to come at a welcome time in Moscow – a rare victory as President Vladimir Putin increases the country’s defense and security spending to 40% of the country’s total budget, the highest on record.
Russia has set aside the equivalent of $145 billion for defense spending next year, up from about $114 billion, according to draft budget documents published earlier this week.
Some economists say the war is the only thing keeping Russia from falling into an immediate recession.
Meanwhile, the Institute for the Study of War on Tuesday cited its own earlier assessment that the seizure of Vuhledar “is unlikely to fundamentally change the course of offensive operations in the western Donetsk Oblast, largely because Vuhledar is not a particularly crucial logistics hub.”
“It is unclear whether Russian forces will make rapid gains beyond Vuhledar in the near future,” the think tank added.
However, the city’s high elevation and its location at the crossroads of the eastern and southern war fronts still make it a valuable target for Russia, according to Reuters.
And its loss has the potential to threaten the security of the entire unoccupied southwestern Donetsk region, Federico Borsari, a fellow in defense and security at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told the Kyiv Independent.
The city is also about 56 kilometers south of Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian logistics hub that has kept Russia under intense pressure all summer – and whose southern flank is now even more vulnerable.
Read the original article on Business Insider
