KYIV: Russian forces were ramping up attacks in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday, Moscow and Kyiv said, as they vie to secure elusive territorial gains before the end of the year.
Despite the frontlines having barely shifted in 2023, fighting has remained intense, with the nearly encircled industrial town of Avdiivka the latest major flashpoint.
Russia launched a renewed bid to capture the war-battered town last month and analysts suggest Moscow’s forces have made incremental gains, though at an enormous human cost.
“The enemy has doubled its artillery fire and airstrikes. It has also intensified ground infantry attacks, and is using armoured vehicles,” said Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesman for Ukraine’s army.
Improving weather conditions — following powerful storms across southern Ukraine and Russia earlier this week — had enabled Russia’s forces to intensify their assaults and use drones again, he said.
Oleksandr Tarnavsky, the Ukrainian commander responsible for the area, also said Russia had “significantly increased” its activity around Avdiivka.
He said Russian forces had carried out nearly 20 airstrikes, launched four missiles, thrown 56 assault waves at his forces, and fired more than 1,000 artillery rounds.
Avdiivka sits in a strategically important indent in the Russian frontlines of the Donetsk region, with Russia’s troops surrounding the town on almost three sides.
Defensive fortifications on its southern edge are just five kilometres (3 miles) north of Donetsk city, the capital of a region Moscow claimed to have annexed last year.
Ukraine has so far held off the Russian bombardment and still controls an eight-kilometre-wide strip of land — and a vital supply road — stretching from Avdiivka to the northwest.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s Tarnavsky said his forces were “firmly holding the line along the Avdiivka front.”
Amid the resistance, Russian losses around the city are mounting. British intelligence said that recent weeks had “likely seen some of the highest Russian casualty rates of the war so far.”
But an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky cautioned on Wednesday that Moscow was prepared to throw “unlimited” numbers of soldiers into the war.
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