Ukrainian units were withdrawn from Ugledar, Donetsk region, “in order to preserve personnel and military equipment, and to occupy a position for further actions.”
This was reported on October 2 at the Khortitsa OSMU:
The enemy sent reserves to carry out flank attacks, which exhausted the defenses of units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As a result of enemy actions, there was a threat of cordoning off the city.
On the Deep State map, Ugledar has been marked under the occupation of Nazi federation troops since October 2.
The battles for Ugledar have continued intermittently since August 2022.
The first bloody assaults near Ugledar became known in November 2022. First, the city was bombed by Russian aircraft, then infantry units went on the offensive.
The military of the 155th Brigade reported that the commander of the 20th Combined Arms Army, General Sukhrab Akhmedov, sent soldiers in poorly organized assaults on Pavlovka near Ugledar, as a result of which the brigade lost about 300 people and 50% of its equipment in 4 days.
On January 24-25, 2023, Russian troops launched a second assault on the city. They were reported to have lost at least 71 pieces of equipment during the attacks, including dozens of tanks and likely hundreds of Pacific Fleet Marines, along with members of the 40th Brigade and special forces of the 14th Separate Brigade killed and wounded.
Russian military correspondent Igor Girkin then wrote that more than 30 units of armored vehicles were lost, there were “many dozen” among the tankers, and even more marines, special forces and motorized riflemen died. According to him, these losses were “one-sided”: the Ukrainians “shot the attackers as if in a shooting gallery.”
On the night of February 13, 2023, Ukrainian HIMARS missiles destroyed the headquarters of the Vostok battalion near Ugledar with a precise strike.
On February 15, Russian troops were driven out of positions south of Ugledar. As the Ukrainian military noted, the largest tank battle of the war took place near the city, during which Russia lost at least 130 tanks and armored personnel carriers.
According to British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, Russia lost about 1,000 soldiers in those two days and an entire brigade was destroyed. Wallace noted that those who were mobilized were “thrown into a meat grinder.”
According to Forbes, the Marine attacks on Ugledar from November 2022 to February 2023 were among the bloodiest in the war. The 155th Marine Brigade, which on paper numbered about 3,000 troops, lost up to 300 men a day for several days in a row and was almost destroyed until February 2023.
By the summer of 2023, the city was destroyed. Of the pre-war population of 15 thousand people, less than 500 remained until February 2023, and less than 100 until July.
Several attacks in the vicinity of the city were carried out in May-June 2024. Thus, on June 28, the Ukrainian Armed Forces destroyed a Russian column in Vugledar, which attacked the 72nd mechanized brigade. The brigade said it destroyed 16 T-80 tanks, 34 combat vehicles and 19 motorcycles, and killed or seriously wounded more than 800 Russian soldiers during the assault.
At the beginning of September, Russian troops resumed fighting in the vicinity of the city, and on September 24 they began their assault on it. On the night of October 1, Ukrainian defenders left Ugledar. Russia received a completely destroyed city, for which it paid with thousands of lives of its soldiers.
In the battles for the city, Russian marine brigades and auxiliary military units lost about a thousand tanks, combat vehicles, trucks and artillery pieces, Forbes wrote on September 26, citing WarSpotting calculations.
This is approximately two brigades of equipment – almost six percent of all equipment that Russia lost during 31 months of stubborn fighting in Ukraine, the author of the article notes.
The exact losses in the battle for Ugledar are still unknown. The city was destroyed, but the Russian forces also lost their most combat-ready units.
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.