Victory in Avdiivka is a symbolic trophy for Russia against Ukraine

Russia’s victory in Avdiivka is being termed a symbolic trophy for Russia in war against Ukraine. Ukraine’s withdrawal from Avdiivka hands Vladimir Putin a major symbolic victory before Russia’s presidential election in March and exposes Kyiv’s critical shortages of weapons and soldiers.

Avdiivka is a small industrial city in the Donbas region. It has been a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression since 2014.

The city is close to Donetsk, which pro-Russian separatists control as their capital. The Moscow-backed fighters briefly took power in Donetsk in July 2014 before Ukrainian forces regained control.

The city is now mostly destroyed and abandoned, with the vast majority of its pre-war population of around 34,000 having fled.

Avdiivka “has been a symbol of Ukraine’s battlefield resolve and Russia’s military failures,” said analyst Ivan Klyszcz of the Estonia-based International Center for Defense and Security.

But it is “strategically insignificant,” added Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“It would have been a good foot in the door for a Ukrainian offensive” on Donetsk city, but Ukraine cannot conduct such an offensive for at least two years and it made “no sense to sacrifice soldiers now,” he said.

For Vladimir Putin, whose re-election as Russian president in March is all but assured with the opposition muzzled or exiled, Avdiivka is a “significant victory,” according to the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War.

Unfavorable odds for Ukraine

A spokesman for one of Ukraine’s top military units said the months-long battle for Avdiivka was even tougher than the bloody fighting in Bakhmut, another industrial eastern city that Russian paramilitary group Wagner claimed to have captured in May 2023.

Oleksandr Borodin of Ukraine’s third assault brigade pointed to Russia’s massive deployment of heavy equipment and air power, with intense bombardment raining down on Ukrainian positions in recent days.

Russia carried out tank attacks with infantry using “a large number” of armored personnel carriers, Soviet-era combat vehicles, planes and drones, whereas Wagner mostly sent men into the Bakhmut front line, he said before Ukraine’s withdrawal.

Although Avdiivka’s defenses had been strengthened since 2014 and inflicted heavy losses since October, Russian forces managed to “infiltrate into the city itself” in mid-January, said Gressel.

In the past two weeks, Ukrainian communication lines were cut or endangered, while some areas faced attacks from all sides, he added.

The delivery of Western F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine “take much too long” and Kyiv’s forces were running short of air-to-air missiles and artillery ammunition, undermining the defense of Avdiivka, Gressel said.