Day 725: 18 February
Today, the most important developments are taking place in the Avdiivka direction.
Last time, I told you that Ukrainian forces completed the first stage of the withdrawal process by leaving all isolated positions that stretched the front line and decreased the overall number of troops in Avdiivka by thirty percent.
This was the moment when the intensity of clashes reached unimaginable heights, as Russians were ordered to close the circle as fast as possible before Ukrainians managed to escape. According to Ukrainian fighters, they hadn’t even seen such big Russian assault units even during the Battle for Bakhmut, where the Wagner Group used cheap lives of their prisoners en masse.
However, since the information about thirty percent of evacuated personnel was primarily based on reports from Russian soldiers, their observations and estimates were lagging behind, and in reality, Ukrainians had already completed the second stage of withdrawal and were mostly located in the residential area. That is why the Ukrainian fighters from the famous Third Assault Brigade were not conducting assaults directed into the town, and focused on preventing Russians from advancing into the fields.
Russian soldiers here aimed to cut off the last two retreat routes that went through the gully towards Lastochkine and a road to Sieverne.
Nonetheless, shortly after that, Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Syrskyi post-factum stated early in the morning on 17 February that Ukrainian forces withdrew from Avdiivka. This was exactly the time when a lot of combat footage started being released from both sides, which confirms the fact that the clashes were so tough that neither side had the time to post videos online.
The combat footage was shocking. One Russian soldier published a video showing how he was passing the outskirts of Avdiivka on his way to the contact line to storm the Ukrainian position. The footage showed multiple bodies with red tape, meaning the person belonged to the Russian assault units every couple of meters, and destroyed heavy equipment every couple of hundreds of meters.
The video lasted five minutes, and the number of corpses was stable and the two Russian soldiers said that out of four thousand soldiers in their brigade, only thirty percent survived thus far.
For context, many military analysts were shocked when Russians claimed that they engage in assaults until the detachments incur up to thirty percent losses, and only then the detachments are rotated out and reconstituted. Thirty percent losses means complete loss of combat capability. In Avdiivka, Russian brigades, which consist of four thousand soldiers each, incurred at least seventy percent losses, according to Russian soldiers who are fighting on the ground right now. With this in mind, the claims of Ukrainian fighters from the third assault brigade that their brigade was fighting against seven Russian brigades make much more sense.
Ukrainian fighters also recently got a chance to describe the dreadful close combat engagements inside the town. They said that Russians used a simple tactic – they gradually accumulated inside basements and houses as close to the contact line as possible, usually, it meant within ten meters from the houses with Ukrainian fighters, and then tried to make a rapid attack.
Most Russian fighters were taken out from machine gun nests, which again explains such a high density of bodies per square meter from the previous footage. According to Ukrainian fighters from the third assault brigade, during their short period of deployment, they reduced two Russian brigades virtually to zero. These were the days when Russian losses per day were once again reaching historic heights, surpassing one thousand two hundred soldiers, more than half of which came from Avdiivka.
The Ukrainian General Staff released the estimates of the total Russian losses in Avdiivka. Ukrainian forces reportedly inflicted losses of almost fifty thousand personnel, three hundred sixty-four tanks, almost seven hundred fifty armored combat vehicles, two hundred fifty artillery systems, and five fighter-bombers between 10 October and 17 February.
In our daily frontline report, we pair up with the military blogger Reporting from Ukraine to keep you informed about what is happening on the battlefield in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
