Zelensky's forces put up a spirited fight against the Russians in October but the advance of these men was only a matter of time as the town has finally been abandoned by Ukraine and taken over by Russia.
The city had been on the frontline since the Russian backed separists launched a rebellion against Kyiv in 2014 making the Ukrainian forces to be vastly outnumbered and picking minimal victories if any on the frontlines.
The Russians had first sustained heavy manpower losses due to the accurate use of the Ukrainian drones but soon changed tactics and sent small infantry units to fight at close ranges giving Ukraine a really hard time to sustain the fight.
The Ukrainian military had earlier warned that the concentration of the Russian soldiers would eventually prevail. General Valery Zaluzhnyi, the then Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces said "the enemy has the ability to concentrate its forces including artillery and aviation in one direction or another. They can make it so that in 2-3 months the town will have the same fate as Bakhmut".which untimely has fallen in spring.
The Ukrainian deputy commander of the 3rd Assault brigade Maksym Zhoryn had said his men had been outnumbered with a ratio of 15:1 and that Russia had sent seven brigades totalling upto 15000 men into the fight.
Untimely, the sheer mass of the Russian forces along side their superior aerial systems left the defense of the town untenable and threatened to encircle the Ukrainian brigades still defending it.
This prompted the new commander- in-chief to order a withdrawal leaving it in the Russian hands with Ukrainian soldiers having a relative withdrawal.
There is already indication that not all the Ukrainian units were able to escape an ever tightening noose as some Ukrainian servicemen were taken ad prisoners at the final stage of a withdrawal under the pressure from the superior Russian forces.
The Russians have made incremental gains around Marrinka, south of Avdiivka inheriting the wastelands in what has become a gruesome battle of attrition.
Ukraine's much larger problem is that it is defending a frontline that is 1000 kilometres long with a chronic shortage of artillery shells and other ammunitions as a $60 billion package of U.S miltary aid has been held in Congress since December and the European Union struggling to send what it had earlier pledged.
The war clocks nearly two years of active warfire with many soldiers lost on either side but nevertheless Russia carried out an additional mobilisation of 300,000 troops to increase its numerical superiority.
