RUSSIA – Russia has captured the key eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar, ending months of resistance and underscoring the scale of Kyiv’s challenge as it heads into its third wartime winter. Footage verified by CNN showed troops waving the Russian flag over the ruins of the city hall of the devastated town, whose population has dropped from around 14,000 to just over a hundred. Ukraine’s military confirmed its withdrawal from Vuhledar Wednesday, noting Russia had managed to send reserves on the flanks, leading to the “threat of encirclement. The decision to withdraw, it said, was taken “to save personnel and military equipment. A key goal of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is to take the whole of the eastern Donbas region. Russia has been making incremental gains this year in the east and the loss comes as Ukraine’s President Zelensky returns from a meeting with US President Joe Biden without his key demands met.

Vuhledar, a town built around a coal mine its name comes from the Ukrainian word for coal sits some 50km 30 miles south of Pokrovsk, viewed for the past few months as Russia’s main nexus of attack in the east. While not a transport and logistics hub like Pokrovsk, Vuhledar was heavily fortified and viewed as a crucial bastion at the intersection of Ukraine’s eastern and southern fronts. One prominent Russian war blogger Boris Rozhin said this made the victory operational, if not operational-strategic. The fact is that this ‘balcony’ an apparent reference to Vuhledar’s elevated position was located at the junction of the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk fronts posed a constant threat to the grouping that covered the approaches to Mariupol he noted, referring to the southern Ukrainian city that has been in Russian hands since 2022.

Just like Avdiivka, another strategic eastern town which fell in February, Vuhledar is a victim, not of Russian strategic prowess, but brute force attrition. For two years Ukraine had put up a formidable defense there, as Russia tried and failed several times to take the town. In February 2023, an attempted Russian assault on Vuhledar led to an uproar among pro-Kremlin military bloggers, as hundreds of Russian troops advanced right into the crosshairs of Ukrainian artillery, launched from the town’s high-rise apartment blocks. (CNN)…[+]