Ukraine sent reinforcements to its northern border on Friday after Russian forces attempted to breach Ukrainian lines along several stretches, applying new pressure on already thinned Ukrainian forces along a 600-mile front.
The Russian attacks began around 5 a.m. on Friday with massive aerial bombardment of Ukrainian positions followed by armored columns attempting to break through at several points along the border, according to a statement from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
“So far these attacks have been repelled and battles of varying intensity are taking place,” the ministry said. “To reinforce the defense in this sector of the front, reserve units have been deployed.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky, during a briefing in kyiv with his Slovak counterpart, Zuzana Caputova, said Russian forces encountered “our troops, brigades and artillery,” adding: “There is a fierce battle in this direction; we confront them with fire”. .”
Still, fighting continued Friday afternoon. Ukrainian forces are severely depleted and short of ammunition along the entire front, and it was unclear what kind of resistance they could put up against a sustained Russian advance, should it occur.
The extent and intent of the Russian advance along the border was also unclear. Military analysts have said Russia could be trying to force Ukraine to spend valuable resources defending the region just as Russian attacks in eastern Ukraine intensify.
Ukrainian officials and Western military analysts have said Moscow likely lacks the combat power to capture Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is 20 miles from the Russian border. On Friday, a senior U.S. military official described the new Russian developments as more of an investigation than a full-fledged press release, but acknowledged that the “fog of war” there made the situation murky.
“The initial cross-border attacks appear to be mostly infantry and may not be the main Russian effort,” said Michael Kofman, senior fellow with the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. He added that the attack was more likely to serve as a repair effort, testing the Ukrainian defense already suffering from a lack of manpower.
Russian officials have not commented on the raids.
It is unclear whether Russia captured any territory. A senior Ukrainian commander said kyiv forces had stopped a Russian raid heading toward a village called Lyptsi, less than a mile from the border in the Kharkiv region. That area was now considered a gray zone, meaning the fighting was too intense and the situation too fluid to say who had control over the land.
The Kharkiv regional administration urged the population of villages near the border to evacuate. Some, like Vovchansk, which has been heavily bombed during the war, have been almost empty for months.
A doctor at the hospital in Vovchansk, which is about four kilometers from the Russian border, said there was heavy fighting throughout the small town. “We are currently evacuating people from the hospital,” he said, asking that his name not be revealed. used because he feared for his safety. “They are hitting very hard and destroying everything.”
He said Ukrainian soldiers appeared to be preventing an advance toward the city, but that the Russians were attacking with everything, including tanks, armored fighting vehicles and fighter jets. He said the hospital was being evacuated. Many of the small villages in the border regions have been being evacuated for months as shelling intensified, and Ukrainian officials said Friday that those efforts were continuing.
President Vladimir V. Putin has made clear that he wants his army to expel Ukrainians from the border to create what he called “a sanitary zone,” both to protect Russian towns and cities on the other side of the border from bombing. to allow it to maintain the areas as staging areas for Russia’s operations in the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine.
Russian forces failed to take Kharkiv in the first weeks of the war and were almost completely driven out of the Kharkiv region in a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the fall of 2022. Hundreds of thousands of people who fled the city returned to their homes and They began to rebuild. their lives.
But in recent months, Russia has intensified its bombing of the city, attacking it almost daily with missiles, drones and powerful guided bombs that have targeted energy infrastructure, industries that play a major role in weapons production and residential neighborhoods. .