Ukraine's Deadly Decision to Refuse to Cede Territory
Dmitri Kovalevich
Al Mayadeen English
The battle for Ugledar, as well as the earlier battles for the cities of Bakhmut, Avdeevka, and Mariupol, show just the opposite of the claims by Zelensky and his political/military government, namely that for the AFU, buildings and even ruins are more important than human beings in uniform.
At the beginning of October, the development most discussed by the Ukraine government and its tightly controlled media was the defeat and withdrawal of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) from the small city of Ugledar (called 'Vuhledar' in Ukraine) in the Donbas region. The chaotic and costly withdrawal (for Ukraine) is the result of Kiev's refusal to withdraw as the city was being encircled by Russian forces. This is not the first time this has happened.
Russian troops waited for evacuations of the remaining 116 civilians in Ugledar before entering and retaking the city on October 2. These were civilians who had been living in basements under shelling for the past two and a half years, refusing to be evacuated. The small city had a pre-war population of 14,000.
Ugledar is a former coal mining city some 50 km southwest of Donetsk city. Since being seized and occupied by far-right Ukrainian paramilitaries in 2014, it has been used by the AFU to regularly shell Donetsk city and neighboring cities and towns, causing countless civilian deaths, injuries, and property damage. Numerous towns and cities of the former Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk (which constitute the historic coal mining and steelmaking region of Donbas) were seized by the paramilitaries in 2014 and after, and have been used in this manner to terrorize the populations there. They resisted the illegal coup of 2014 in Kyiv. Today, Donetsk and Lugansk are constituent republics of the Russian Federation, following several referendum votes that have taken place there.