Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy replaced the commander of the eastern front, the hottest battlefield of the war in Ukraine, after Russian forces captured another strategic city.
Brigadier General Andriy Hnatov was replaced as commander of the eastern battlefield by Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi, commander-in-chief of the ground forces, who will retain his previous duties. Hnatov was given a role overseeing training and communications, A2 CNN reports.
In his video address, Zelenskyy said the goal was to strengthen command of troops in the Donetsk region. Donetsk, a battleground since 2014 and one of four provinces that Russia claims to have annexed since its full-scale occupation in 2022, has been the main focus of fighting for more than a year.
The new eastern commander, Drapatyi, 42, is highly respected in the army, where he is credited with stopping a Russian offensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region last year.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military confirmed it had withdrawn from the town of Velyka Novosilka in the Donetsk region, a day after Russia said it had captured it. Viktor Trehubov, a military spokesman for Ukraine’s eastern front, confirmed that Russian troops had entered the town but said fighting was continuing on the outskirts. Russian forces have been advancing slowly but steadily into eastern Ukraine for more than a year in relentless ground fighting that has inflicted massive military losses on both sides. Kiev, for its part, has managed to capture and hold a pocket of territory inside Russia over the past six months.
Trehubov, the spokesman for the eastern forces, said the logistics center of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region remains the main Russian target. About 7,000 people are believed to remain inside Pokrovsk, which had a population of about 60,000 before the occupation.
As the war nears its three-year mark in February, Ukraine is outnumbered on the battlefield and its troops are exhausted. The government has tried to address the issue by lowering the mobilization age to 25 from 27 and introducing tougher rules for draft dodgers. But so far it has resisted lowering the mobilization age further to boost the workforce. (A2 Televizion)
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