Russian troops reach centre of Ukraine bastion Vuhledar
The town has strategic significance because of its high ground and its location near the junction of the two main fronts
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 2½ 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 television, describing the situation as very difficult.
President Volodymyr Zelensky 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.
