MOSCOW, March 3. /TASS/. A Ukrainian commander said that last night his recon group was given instructions to retreat from Artyomovsk as soon as possible.

"Today, on the night of March 2, the unit Madyar’s Birds was given a combat order to immediately leave Bakhmut (the Ukrainian name for Artyomovsk - TASS) for another battlefield," the group’s commander, codenamed Madyar, said in a video address posted on his Telegram channel on Friday.

He refused to comment on either the instructions or the reasons for the redeployment "at a critical moment for Bakhmut."

On Thursday, Sergey Rakhmanin from the Verkhovna Rada’s national security, defense and reconnaissance committee said the Ukrainian armed forces would be pulled back from Artyomovsk sooner or later. According to him, Ukrainian troops are currently making the necessary preparations "for an organized retreat." The Ukrainian lawmaker also described the situation in Artyomovsk as "very risky" for Ukraine’s army.

Artyomovsk is located in the Kiev-controlled part of the Donetsk People’s Republic and is an important transport hub for supplying the Ukrainian group of troops in Donbass. Fierce fighting is taking place for the city. Russian forces have taken control of a number of settlements on the outskirts of Artyomovsk, including Kleshcheyevka, Podgorodnoye, Paraskoviyevka, Berkhovka and Yagodnoye.

Yan Gagin, a military-political expert and advisor to the acting DPR head, told TASS that Russian forces had blocked supplies to the Ukrainian group of troops in Artyomovsk and claimed full control of all the roads. He emphasized that the ring around the city would soon close and that, in fact, Ukraine had already lost a key logistics hub, thousands of servicemen and mercenaries and large amounts of military hardware.