It’s a little more than a city that the Russians have just conquered. According to several Western or Russian observers, the Kremlin troops conquered this Tuesday 1is October 2024 the town of Vuhledar. Located in southern Donbass, at the crossroads of the eastern and southern fronts, the latter had been close to the line of contact since the start of the war and had resisted several assaults.
A city caught in a vice for several weeks
But the maneuver launched by the Russians during the month of September proved fatal. As we explained to you in the video below, Vuhledar, which had 15,000 inhabitants before the war, had indeed been squeezed in recent weeks.
At the start of the month, the Russians had advanced north of the city, around the town of Vodiane, before advancing on its western flank. Then, over the past few days, they had concentrated their efforts on the city itself, to reduce the last pockets of Ukrainian resistance there.
The operations therefore ended this Tuesday 1is October, confirms on the social network
A conquest far from trivial on a military level
As Olivier Kempf notes, this conquest of Vuhledar by the Russians could have notable consequences on the military level.
“Vuhledar is a logistical node whose loss would mechanically imply a retreat of the defensive line because the Ukrainians would then have to rely on other logistical nodes located deeper », explained in mid-September to West France Thibault Fouillet, scientific director of the Institute for Strategy and Defense Studies. This setback, which could be several kilometers, would weaken the Ukrainian system in the sector, especially since kyiv’s troops are also losing ground a little further north, in the Pokrovsk sector.
“Potentially, the loss of the city threatens the security of the entire southwestern part of Donetsk Oblast,” summarized in mid-September Federico Borsari, researcher at the Center for European Policy Analysis, with the Kyiv Independent .
A symbol that falls
The fall of Vuhledar also has a strong symbolic dimension. Fortified in 2014, targeted by several assaults since February 2022, the town of Vuhledar was considered an important stronghold in Donbass still under Ukrainian control.
Its fall therefore concretizes the generalized Ukrainian decline observed in recent months, while potentially announcing other declines, more or less localized.
