Even from a few miles away, the death rattle of another Ukrainian city echoed through the mist and fog. Russian warplanes were dropping more thousand-pound bombs on Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, reducing an already battered city to rubble and ashes.
Since Jan. 1, President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces have dropped around one million pounds of aerial bombs on an area encompassing just 12 square miles, according to estimates by Ukrainian officials and British intelligence.
Avdiivka fell to the Russians on Saturday, after some of the most horrific and destructive fighting of the two-year-old war. In the end, Russia’s superior firepower and manpower overwhelmed Ukrainian forces over many months, even as Russia incurred a staggering number of casualties.
The Ukrainians withdrew under withering bombardment, fighting intense battles across ruined streets to break out of Russian attempts to encircle them. Russian warplanes bombed the hulking coke-processing plant on Avdiivka’s northern outskirts, using incendiary munitions to blow up fuel tanks at the plant, unleashing a toxic smog, according to Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the plant.
“Avdiivka is a constant barrage of aviation bombs,” Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of the 3rd Special Assault Brigade, said on Friday. “It feels like the largest number of air bombs on such a stretch of land in the entire history of humanity. These bombs completely obliterate any positions. All buildings, structures, after just one airstrike, turn into craters.”
Astonishingly, more than 900 civilians had remained in the city, according to city administrators and the police — from a prewar population of 30,000 — living subterranean lives and surviving on food and supplies brought in by aid workers.
In the aftermath of the Ukrainian withdrawal, their fate was unknown.
“I have not been able to reach anyone for the past two days,” said Ihor Fir, a mechanic at the coke plant before it was destroyed, who was regularly risking his life to bring food, water and medicine to the civilians still living in Avdiivka and surrounding villages.
The last messages he received were from people desperate to escape, but unable to move under the constant shelling. Any survivors in the city, he said, were likely to be stranded. “There is no way for them to get out,” he said by phone on Saturday. “The road is under shelling.”
In an interview last week, Mr. Fir called conditions in Avdiivka “just horrible” and shared videos and photos of the devastation from his last trip into the city earlier this month. “There are ruins everywhere,” he said. “There isn’t a single house left untouched.”
“Multistory buildings collapse like card houses, and very often people remain under the rubble and, unfortunately, we cannot reach them,” said Vitalii Barabash, the head of the Avdiivka military administration.
He estimated earlier this month that at least 800 guided bombs, each weighing between 550 and 3,300 pounds, had been dropped this year within the city limits. His claim could not be independently confirmed, but the British intelligence agency reported that in just four weeks, Russian warplanes dropped some 600 guided bombs on Avdiivka, with as many as 50 recorded in a single day.
The Russian tactics in Avdiivka were “a textbook punishment campaign, which they have orchestrated in Chechnya, Syria, Ukraine and even Afghanistan,” said Seth. G. Jones, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It is designed,” he said, “to raise the societal costs of continued resistance and coerce the adversary and its population to give up.” Mr. Putin hailed the capture of Avdiivka as “an important victory,” the Kremlin said on Saturday.
There are no reliable statistics on the number of soldiers or civilians killed in the bombardments.
Mr. Fir shared pictures of the ruins of a supermarket hit by a bomb last week as 15 people sheltered in the basement. At least 10…
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