The fighting grew increasingly fierce last month at the Zenith air defense base, a mile south of Avdiivka, where for years a group of Ukrainian soldiers defended the city’s southern approaches.
Russian troops had moved up their flanks and pounded them from all sides with tank, artillery and mortar fire, shattering their defenses and injuring men.
“Every day we were trying to repel enemy attacks,” said Senior Private Viktor Bilyak, a 26-year-old with the 110th Mechanized Brigade who had spent 620 days defending the base. “All the fortifications were being destroyed and there was no possibility of building new ones.”
Soldiers interviewed after their retreat described an uneven four-month battle under a relentless onslaught of Russian artillery and cluster munitions that destroyed buildings and breached deep concrete bunkers. As the Ukrainians took casualties, they were increasingly outnumbered by the Russians who attacked the city, who broke through two strategic points and quickly seeded areas with fighters.
The fall of the city, when it came in mid-February, was brutal and swift, occurring in less than a week.
For two weeks, as soldiers warned they could be overrun by Russian forces, their commanders told them to continue holding their positions, a delay that cost lives, Private Biliak said. Some units collapsed under Russian fire. A company retreated to the Zenith base after losing its positions.
The final retreat was dangerous and costly, as Russian artillery constantly shelled the roads leading out of the city. Many soldiers died along the way.
The heaviest casualties occurred in the city center from heavy Russian shelling, said Shaman, 36, commander of the 25th Separate Battalion, who was monitoring his units from a command post. Some brigades lost contact with units under bombardment. One group retreated to a house and was killed when a cluster bomb hit it, said Shaman, who like other interviewees identified himself by his call sign for security reasons.
The capture of Avdiivka was the Russians’ biggest gain in nine months and a blow to Ukrainian forces struggling with ammunition and manpower shortages.
As they regrouped in the villages and training grounds after retreating from Avdiivka, Ukrainian soldiers expressed no doubt that they had lost the town, a stronghold on the eastern front that had been the target of Russian attacks for 10 years.
“It was the lack of ammunition,” said Shaman, whose battalion was deployed to Avdiivka in October when the Russians launched a new offensive against the town. “No question.”
With sufficient artillery, Ukrainian troops could have held the city, he said, knocking out Russian supplies and logistics behind the lines and preventing reinforcements from entering.
One soldier, Roman, 48, from the Territorial Defense Force, spent three months in Avdiivka with his unit last spring. “It was difficult,” he said. ‘We had no support’ The unit was sent in February to help defend the Avdiivka coke and chemical plant, which served as the Ukrainian army headquarters on the edge of the city.
He choked up as he described the losses his unit had suffered in the war. “We had 20 in the unit, eight left,” he said. Of his company of 86, only 28 remained, he added. There is no official count of Ukrainian casualties in Avdiivka, but commanders have said hundreds are likely to have perished when the city fell.
Ukrainian officials say Russian casualties have been much higher as their repeated attacks have been met with Ukrainian artillery fire and drone strikes, leaving fields and trenches strewn with corpses and broken armor.
But the Russian troops kept coming and managed to reach the outskirts of the city from the north and south. By the end of January they were ready to penetrate the inhabited areas. They broke in at two important points, from the northeast along the railway line and to the south by tunneling through sewers to attack Ukrainian positions from the rear.
“That was a red flag,” said Trooper Biliak.
Soldiers at the Zenith base began urging their commanders to ask them to withdraw, he said. They were told to wait.
Inside the city, Russia dropped up to 80 to 100 cluster bombs, known by the acronym KAB, each day. A single warplane would drop four half-ton bombs, which exploded in sequence, gouging huge craters in the earth or leveling high-rise concrete buildings.
“When a KAB goes down, you wonder if the concrete will fall on you and they won’t be able to dig you out,” said one soldier, whose call sign is Patrick, 42. “We saw it happen.”
Russian drones were constantly hovering over the streets. A doctor, phone signal Malyi, 23, was running out of town with a wounded soldier one day with a Russian drone in hot pursuit. The drone miraculously hit the spare tire on the back of the car and bounced off. Malyi and his injured passenger survived.
“It’s life or death out there,” he said.
By early February, Russian troops were close to encircling the city and cutting off the last two roads. On February 9, Dmytro, 36, the commander of Stugna, a military intelligence unit, was ordered to Avdiivka to help repel the Russian infiltration and secure the main road into the city for troop withdrawal.
The unit joined the 3rd Assault Brigade which had arrived a week earlier, but they found that Russian troops had spread into the neighborhood so quickly that their plans were out of date before they could use them. “The situation was changing by the hour,” said Dmytro.
Within days of Stugna’s arrival, on 13 February, Russian troops seized the main road into the city and began working under a line of trees towards a second road to the south, which was the last route. Ukrainian soldiers were already driving through heavy fire to bring in supplies and evacuate the wounded, but thousands of them would be stranded if the Russians took control of that road.
Nearly surrounded, the men at Zenith Air Force Base were finally ordered to evacuate. A first group didn’t make it, hit by artillery fire. The main group set out on the night of February 15, walking in small groups across the fields in the dark. Private Biliak led one group, but said they came under shell fire and never saw the others again.
By dawn several dozen men had gathered in some cottages on the edge of town. It was foggy, which meant they weren’t flying drones, and even though they weren’t ordered to do so, they kept falling back towards the only way out.
The Russians made six attempts to take control of the tree line, Dmytro said, and his units repelled them each time with artillery. But in the end the Ukrainians could not stop the flow of Russians.
He could send four to eight men as reinforcements, but he said the Russians put in groups of 30 at a time. “To stop a group of 30 people, you would need 50 shells,” he said. “You need five shells to fix fire and we can only use 10 shells.”
However, Stugna held the road at two intersections, and Ukrainian troops steadily withdrew from the city, by vehicle and on foot, mostly under the cover of darkness. Private Biliak hitched a ride with other wounded in an armored vehicle in the early hours of February 16. The last units from Zenith came out the next day.
But they left behind six men — five wounded and an aide — who were captured and killed by Russian troops, Ukrainian officials later said. “It was six. Our children who remained. We should remember that there were three times as many dead on the road as well,” said Private Biliak.
The road led through the fields and was under constant fire. “You could still drive through, but most people got out on foot,” Dmytro said.
At the chemical plant the 25th Separate Battalion was the last to leave, shortly before dusk on 17 February, heading north on foot.
“There were only 21 of us left to guard the whole factory,” said Staf, 36, a tall soldier in an ill-fitting helmet. “They were coming from three sides,” he said. “He was within gun range,” another soldier said. “They were close enough to throw a grenade.”
The next day, on their seventh attempt, the Russians took the tree line and cut off the road below, Dmytro said. “A day earlier,” he said, “it would have been a mess.”
Marc Santora contributed reporting from the Donetsk region and Kyiv, Ukraine.
