Russian forces continued their advance through northeastern Ukraine on Sunday, taking a number of small settlements along the border and forcing Ukrainian troops to withdraw from some positions, aid workers and Ukrainian military officials said.
Aid workers said Russian troops had advanced deeper into Ukrainian territory and were now threatening several small towns on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
According to a Ukrainian military unit, Russian forces are pushing hard from the Russia-Ukraine border towards Kharkiv.
“Today, during intense fighting, our defenders were forced to withdraw from some of their positions, and today, another settlement has come completely under Russian control,” said a video statement released Saturday night by Hostri Kartuzy, a member of the Ukrainian special forces. unit. “Russians are dying en masse. But they keep going regardless and are successful in some areas.”
Russian forces launched a complex and surprise offensive on Friday, deploying fighter jets, artillery units, infantry and armored vehicles, crossing the northeastern border between Russia and Ukraine.
As fighting rages in the area, cross-border fire has intensified and Russia accused Ukraine on Sunday of attacking a multi-story building in the Russian city of Belgorod, about 45 miles from Kharkiv. Russia’s state news agency TASS said there were at least 17 victims, without specifying the death toll.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said fragments from an intercepted Ukrainian missile had hit the building. Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod region, posted a video from the site showing a gaping hole in a building. “The entire entrance from the 10th to the first floor collapsed,” he said.
The claims could not be independently verified and Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the strike.
The new Russian offensive near Kharkiv has allowed its troops to quickly seize tens of square kilometers of Ukrainian territory. Civilians living in small rural towns and villages along the border have been caught in the crossfire and many are desperately trying to escape. More than 4,000 people have been evacuated, the governor of Kharkiv said Sunday morning. Some of them were extracted with their pets. Others have been taken out on stretchers.
All day Saturday, small vans and even bright yellow school buses rumbled over cratered roads riddled with bomb shrapnel to rescue people trapped in cities that had come under heavy bombing.
On Sunday, people who had evacuated were begging their loved ones still in border villages to leave.
Svitlana Nahorna said her husband was trapped in Bilyi Kolodiaz, a small village northeast of Kharkiv.
“I was begging him to leave, but he refused,” she said at a shelter for displaced people in Kharkiv. “We are afraid that it will be possible to get him out now.”
Military analysts believe the Russians launched this attack to distract thin Ukrainian forces from the disputed battlefields of eastern Ukraine and force them to divert troops they cannot send to the northeastern border area.
The Russians are also trying to create a buffer zone along the border to make it more difficult for Ukrainian forces to launch artillery into Russia. The Russians could also be trying to get close enough to Kharkiv to bomb it and sow panic, as they did in the early days of the war in 2022, analysts say.
“The seizure of the city of Kharkiv is certainly a desired operational objective of Russian forces, but not one that the Russian military appears to be pursuing in the short term,” said the Institute for the Study of War, a research group. based in Washington. in a report on Saturday.
The group said the most likely goal of the attack was to “draw Ukrainian forces from other sectors of the front and at the same time allow Russian forces” to advance to “within artillery range of the city of Kharkiv.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appeared to strike a note of growing concern in a speech on Saturday. “The focus is primarily on the front line,” he said.
Citing all the fighting in eastern Ukraine, he added: “It’s extremely difficult.”
Constant Méheut contributed reporting from Kyiv.