After all-night air raid alarms, a weary Kharkiv woke up Saturday morning to a heavy gray sky and the disconcerting news that the Russian army was continuing to advance into nearby Ukrainian territory.
All night, dull explosions from battlefields 40 miles away echoed through Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. On Saturday morning, a day after Russian forces took several villages along the border and Ukraine sent reinforcements to the area, the ghostly wail of air raid sirens still sounded over deserted parks and long, empty boulevards. from the city.
Thousands of people flee the border areas and reach shelters in Kharkiv.
Tetiana Novikova is one of them.
Until Friday, he had spent his 55th birthday in Vovchansk, a small town near the Russian border. She was born there, married there, worked in a factory there, and raised two children there.
But the bombing became so terrifying that she and her family made the painful decision to leave the home they had lived in for decades. On Friday afternoon she arrived with her elderly parents, shocked, hungry and a little lost, at a Kharkiv school converted into a reception center for displaced people.
The only people left in Vovchansk, Novikova said, “are the elderly and the disabled, and they cannot move.”
“If a missile hits where they live,” he added, “the streets will be filled with bodies.”
More than two years later, the war in Ukraine continues to find new areas of misery.
At dawn on Friday, Russian forces launched a complex assault that deployed fighter jets, heavy artillery, ground troops and armor against a portion of Ukraine’s northeastern border with Russia that had been relatively quiet. Russian troops stormed across the border and captured several villages and a group of besieged Ukrainian soldiers, according to images widely circulating on social media.
On Saturday, Russian forces were still shelling Vovchansk, but there had been no major changes to the front line. Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed to have captured five border settlements lying along two main axes that Moscow’s troops appear to have followed, but Ukraine’s general staff said its forces were fighting defensive battles and mounting “counteroffensive measures.” ” around Vovchansk and another town, Lyptsi.
Ukrainians referred to the border areas as the “gray zone,” meaning the fighting was too intense and the situation too fluid to say who was in control.
Military analysts believe the new offensive is unlikely to reach the streets of Kharkiv. The Ukrainian army has built elaborate defenses around the city, digging miles of trenches and stitching the landscape with gleaming barbed wire, mines and countless small cement pyramids that block tanks, “dragon teeth,” as soldiers here call them. .
But analysts agree that this attack comes at an especially difficult time for Ukraine. Their forces are exhausted, exhausted and running out of ammunition. Supplies from a long-delayed U.S. aid package are just beginning to reach the front lines, and Ukrainians are more vulnerable than they have been in months.
“The next few weeks are likely to be a very bleak affair for Ukrainian ground forces in the east,” said Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group, in an initial assessment of the offensive.
“While the attacks currently appear to be small-scale,” he said, the purpose is to “damage Ukraine’s morale, both civilian and military.”
“If the Ukrainians decide to hold the ground at all costs, they will lose more members of their shrinking army,” he added.
The result, he said, could be “a tough test” and “one of the most difficult times for Ukraine in the war so far.”
Russian forces sent reconnaissance and sabotage units across the border early Friday, followed by devastating artillery strikes and aerial bombs dropped deeper into Ukrainian territory, according to Ukrainian press reports and the country’s Defense Ministry. Video footage circulated widely on Ukrainian media channels revealed the aftermath in Vovchansk: fires, splintered trees and elegant cream-colored buildings trimmed in white with giant holes punched through them and their walls turned into waterfalls of falling bricks.
With continued heavy shelling and patchy front-line reporting, it was difficult to assess Saturday morning how much territory the Ukrainians might have lost. Some military analysts estimated that the Russian advance left them in control of at least 30 square kilometers.
American officials remained hopeful that Ukrainian troops would eventually stop this Russian attack. For months, Ukrainians have been preparing for it, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening speech that Ukraine was sending reinforcements to the Kharkiv area.
Still, Ukraine must be careful with its response, given how stretched its troops are. Russian forces have been slowly but steadily breaking through Ukrainian defenses 150 miles to the south, heading for the small but strategically located former industrial city of Chasiv Yar. Recent reports indicate that Russian troops have advanced close enough to a critical highway to nearly cut off Ukrainian supply lines to the city. The Russians attacked the northern border area precisely to distract Ukrainian forces in this area, Ukrainian military officials said.
The northern border villages where fighting is now taking place have been the subject of disputes before. Vovchansk has experienced the full war cycle: occupied by Russian troops after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, liberated in September 2022, and bombed sporadically since then.
Life there, in recent days, has become unsustainable. There is no telephone service or electricity and there is little food. All stores are closed. Even the Ukrainian soldiers have left, residents reported, although Ukrainian officials have said their soldiers are managing to defend the city, perhaps from the outskirts.
“It’s impossible to go back,” Novikova said. “The Russians are destroying everything,” she said. “They are erasing streets.”
While her family was sheltering in place on Friday, she said a bomb from a Russian plane took down a nearby school. The blast wave broke windows and shook homes blocks away.
“And that’s just a bombshell,” he said. “They’re throwing away dozens.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kharkiv and Marc Santora and Constant Méheut from Kyiv, Ukraine.