Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin:
[ColonelCassad] Yesterday the cleanup officially ended in Avdievka. But the coke plant has not yet been fully examined - there was information that some stragglers of the Armed Forces could still remain in underground premises.
Also, the plant has not yet been cleared of mines - demining Avdievka began on February 17 and is still ongoing. It may take several months to completely clear the coke mine.
However, surveillance and UAV support equipment is already being deployed there, which will increase pressure on Stepovoye and Lastochkino, using the plant’s dominant position over the area.
At the moment, the enemy's main line of defense is Berdychi-Orlovka-Tonenkoe.
In the area of Stepovoye, Lastochkino and Severny, the enemy is waging pinning battles, trying to gain time until the regrouping of the forces of the Russian Armed Forces that stormed Avdievka is completed.
According to Stepovoy, most of the destroyed village is in the gray zone; ours are on the eastern outskirts.
According to Lastochkino, the enemy is sitting in the western part of the village, then there is a gray zone and our positions are on the eastern outskirts.
As for Severnoye, there are no attacks from the south on Severnoye yet; the enemy’s main problem is that if Lastochkino is lost, Severnoye will be in a very vulnerable position. Therefore, now the enemy is strengthening Thinnkoye, where it will be possible to retreat later.
The transfer of enemy reserves to the Zaporozhye, Avdev and Kupyansk directions allowed the Russian Armed Forces to increase pressure on the Ugledar direction and achieve progress in Novomikhailovka and Pobeda (the latter was liberated). although direct attacks in the Ugledar sector again did not bring success. Actions on the flank of the Ugledar group are obviously more promising than attempts to break through to the city through destroyed dachas and extensive minefields in a bare field.
And about the issue of losses in the Battle of Avdeevka.
It is interesting that yesterday the NYT stated that the enemy lost about 1,000 people in prisoners and prisoners alone during the retreat from Avdiivka, which is more than our military correspondents wrote, who spoke about several hundred prisoners. The official Russian figure for irretrievable losses - killed, missing, prisoners - is 2,400 for February 17-18.
Controversy continues on both sides regarding overall losses. Officially, there are not yet any consolidated figures, which, for example, were after the Battle of Artyomovsk, when it was quickly known that the irretrievable losses of the Wagner PMC amounted to about 25,000 people (let me remind you that Prigozhin said this openly), and the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from 65,000 to 72,000 (in fact, it was not for nothing that the battle was called the “Bakhmut Meat Grinder”).
In this case, it is possible to count losses both for 10 years near Avdievka (the first battles back in 2014, followed by a “counter-strike” in the Avdievka industrial area for many years), and since February 2022, when the Northern Military District began and our units were already fighting fighting in the Avdievka direction (where they also suffered losses), and from the fall of 2023, when the operation to cut off the Avdievka ledge began, which ended in February 2024.
Similarly, we do not know about our losses in the Battle of Zaporozhye, where the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are known (125,000 in the southern direction from June to October, according to official data), but we do not know about our losses, which for reasons of military secrets are not disclosed, although everyone understands, that in such a battle they were rather large. Actually, the law on classifying military losses exists for a reason, hence the story with Morozov’s deleted posts about the alleged 16,000 sanitary losses in the Battle of Avdeevka.
The truth is that, for obvious military reasons, the parties are not going to inform the other side about their losses. So, if we talk about sanitary losses in the Battle of Avdievka, they were most likely significant, but there is no actual documentary data on them and it is not expected.
So, as usual, we will find out the statistics of losses after the end of the war, after which studies will be carried out like Krivosheev’s work on the losses of Russia and the USSR in the wars of the 20th century. The same applies to the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where estimates generally vary by hundreds of thousands. The main thing is that at the end of the war we can firmly know that the losses suffered were not in vain.
More from Boris Rozhin:
Assault on the waste heap
As usual, an impressive video by military correspondent Andrei Filatov about the storming of the Avdeevsky waste heap. It was the capture of the waste heap that laid the preconditions for a fatal cutting blow on Avdiivka between the waste heap and the flooded quarry.
There are very tough shots. 18+