Russian troops reach centre of Ukrainian bastion Vuhledar

By Olena Harmash and Gleb Garanich

KYIV (Reuters) -Russian troops have reached the centre of Vuhledar, a bastion on strategic high ground in eastern Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region that had resisted Russian assaults since Moscow’s full-scale invasion, a regional Ukrainian official said on Tuesday.

Footage posted to social media showed Russian soldiers waving a flag from atop a bombed-out multi-storey building and unfurling another flag on a metal spire on a roof. Reuters determined the footage matched street patterns of Vuhledar.

Other images showed smoke rising over the ruins of the once small mining town, now a deserted and devastated battlefield where Ukrainian units had held off previous armoured Russian assaults through 2-1/2 years of war.

“The enemy is already nearly in the centre of the city,” Vadym Filashkin, governor of the Donetsk region that makes up part of the broader Donbas historical area, told Ukrainian TV, describing the situation as very difficult.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian military did not comment on Tuesday on the situation in Vuhledar. It was unclear whether Russian forces controlled the whole town.

“Vuhledar… the city we all fought for, the city where soldiers from different units laid down their lives, the city where I met the war with a weapon in hand,” Stanislav Buniatov, a Ukrainian military blogger and a volunteer soldier said on the Telegram messaging app.

Combat footage by the popular war blog DeepState showed Russian forces throughout Vuhledar. Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne quoted soldiers fighting there as saying they had not received an order to leave.

Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that President Vladimir Putin “regularly receives direct information from the military” including on Vuhledar, but there was no official comment from Moscow that the town was taken.

Russian military bloggers, including a group of military analysts who ran the prominent Rybar Telegram channel, touted the capture of the city, which could speed up the advance of Russian forces in Donbas.

Vuhledar has strategic significance because of its high ground and its location near the junction of the two main fronts, in eastern and southern Ukraine. Russian forces reached the outskirts last week and have since intensified their push.

Earlier, Andriy Nazarenko, commander of a drone battalion of the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, said they were outgunned and outmanned in Vuhledar.

“The situation in Vuhledar is very difficult, it is the hardest because assaults have been going on for more than six months and the enemy is constantly rotating its ranks with fresh, trained forces,” Nazarenko told Reuters.

Speaking from an undisclosed location during a Zoom interview, Nazarenko said his unit was doing everything possible to maintain “a window” for the infantry to be able to retreat from the town.

RUSSIA’S FAST ADVANCE

Since August, Moscow’s troops have advanced at their fastest rate for more than two years in eastern Ukraine, despite Ukrainian forces mounting a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. 

Oleksandr Kovalenko, a Ukrainian military analyst, said that about 2,000 to 3,000 Russian troops were in the town, attacking from three different directions.

“We will not be able to hold on in Vuhledar in these conditions,” Kovalenko told Reuters, saying the decision to retreat from Vuhledar should be taken quickly.

Full control over Vuhledar would help Moscow’s troops to improve their logistics by using railways more actively, easing their further advance in the region and giving them positions on heights from which to fire artillery.

Filashkin, urging people to leave, said that about 350,000 people remained in government-held parts of the region, down from about 1.9 million before the war. Only 107 civilians remained in Vuhledar, which had a pre-war population of about 14,000, he said.

The Donetsk region, where Russian proxy forces launched a revolt in 2014, is one of four Ukrainian provinces that Moscow claimed to have annexed in late 2022. Moscow says capturing the rest of the province is one of its principal war aims.

Ukraine drove back Russian forces from the outskirts of Kyiv and recaptured territory in a counter-offensive in 2022. But another Ukrainian counter-offensive last year was a failure and Russian forces have mostly had the battlefield initiative since.

(Reporting by Olena Harmash, Gleb Garanich, Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Writing by Olena Harmash, Ron Popeski and Lidia Kelly; Editing by Peter Graff, Alexandra Hudson, Jonathan Oatis and Deepa Babington)