Avdiivka city in Eastern Ukraine has been added to territories under Russia after it fell to Russian troops on Saturday.
Ukraine said its troops had pulled out of the former stronghold to save soldiers’ lives.
Facing ammunition shortages and outnumbered on the battlefield, Ukrainian forces announced they had withdrawn in the early hours of Saturday.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had informed President Vladimir Putin of the advance, said a defense ministry statement.
Putin “congratulated our military and fighters on such an important victory,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state media.
The battle for Avdiivka, less than 10 kilometres north of the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk, has been one of the bloodiest of the nearly two-year war.
Many compare it to the battle for Bakhmut, in which tens of thousands of soldiers were killed.
It followed months of pressure after Russian forces stepped up efforts to capture the eastern industrial hub in October, devastating the city and causing mass casualties.
The capture of Avdiivka represents Russia’s biggest victory in the war since May.
Earlier Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a security conference in Munich: “The ability to save our people is the most important task for us. In order to avoid being surrounded, it was decided to withdraw to other lines.”
“This does not mean that people retreated some kilometres and Russia captured something,” he added. “It did not capture anything.”
Earlier, Ukraine’s newly appointed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said he had “decided to withdraw our units from the city and switch to defense on more favorable lines.”
A number of Ukrainian servicemen were captured in the operation, several military officials said.
On the eastern front line, one Ukrainian serviceman told journalists that withdrawing was “the right decision given the lack of weapons and artillery shells, because if we don’t save the lives of the soldiers, we will soon have no one left to fight.”
Avdiivka lies in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, which the Kremlin has claimed to be part of Russia since a 2022 annexation that remains unrecognized by nearly all United Nations members.
In July 2014, it briefly fell into the hands of pro-Russian separatists before returning to Ukrainian control.
But the Ukrainian army faced renewed Russian assaults including in the eastern Donetsk region.
