Ukraine continues to pull its military troops from territories that it previously occupied due to a recent onslaught by Russian forces.
On Monday, a spokesman for the country’s army said that troops were pulled out of a village in the eastern part of Ukraine. This came as Russia is starting to show advantages that they have both in ammunition and manpower.
The village where the troops withdrew from is called Lastochkyne. Dmytro Lykhovii, a spokesman for one of the troop groupings in Ukraine, said on a national TV broadcast that the troops would be falling back to other villages nearby so as to try to hold that new line.
That village is just west of Avdiivka, a Donetsk suburb that Russian forces finally captured in mid-February after a battle took place there over the last four months. Ukrainian forces were overwhelmed by the military might that Russia showed, according to officials, forcing them to pull their troops out and try to mount a new defense in a different location.
The Ministry of Defense in Russia also confirmed this week that they had “liberated” the village of Lastochkyne.
RIA Novosti, a local news agency that’s owned by the Russian state, spoke to commander Andre Mordvichev, who said troops pushed back the Ukrainian forces about 10 kilometers, which is the equivalent of about six months.
He added that the troops would continue to be on the offensive, and that a key supply route for Ukrainian troops used to run through that village.
ABC News reported that it wasn’t able to independently verify the claims that either said had made in this incident.
Losing Lykhovii isn’t a huge defeat in and of itself, ABC News reported. However, it does show the challenges that Ukrainian forces are facing on the battlefield as the war is now in its third year.
The recent developments for the Ukrainian side are quite bleak, actually.
Troops from Russia keep plowing forward and are smashing large cities and small towns alike with the superior firepower they have, even though they’ve suffered a significant loss of equipment and troops over the course of the war, according to Ukrainian officials.
Many western military analysts have said that Russian troops are attacking along four parallel axes in the country’s northeast section, with the apparent aim of pressing further into the western part of the Donetsk region, which Ukraine currently controls.
They also have hopes to penetrate deeper into the Kharkiv region, which sits to the north of Donetsk.
On Sunday, Rustan Umerov, the defense minister of Ukraine, complained that half of the military support that was promised by western nations to Ukraine doesn’t arrive on the agreed-to timeline. In turn, it becomes very difficult for Ukraine to go through proper planning, ultimately costing many soldiers their lives, he said.
Even still, leaders in most western nations continue to say they’ll support Ukraine for as long as is needed to defeat Russia, which began its full-scale invasion of its neighbor on February 24 of 2022.
