Senior Ukrainian military officials have warned that Russia is building up troops near northeastern Ukraine, raising fears that a new offensive may be imminent in a region that has become a pressure point for strained Ukrainian forces.
Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, said Thursday that Moscow was redeploying troops to Vovchansk and Lyptsi, two towns near the city of Kharkiv that Russian forces have been trying to capture for more than two weeks. Other officials have also said that Russia has massed troops further north, opposite Ukraine’s Sumy region, in preparation for a possible ground offensive in that area.
“These forces are not sufficient to launch a large-scale offensive and break our defenses,” General Syrsky wrote on Facebook on Thursday. Still, he said, a reorganization of Ukrainian defenses in the area was underway to be prepared to repel the attacks.
Russia’s incursion across the border into Kharkiv has introduced a worrying threat to Ukraine’s military, which is already under constant attack further southeast in the Donbas. Commanders have been forced to move troops north to shore up defenses while waiting for Western weapons in large enough numbers to have an impact.
The concentration of Russian troops north of the border, near the city of Sumy, about 90 miles northwest of Kharkiv, makes the situation even more precarious, expanding the amount of territory Ukraine must defend. Analysts say an offensive in the Kharkiv or Sumy regions could push Ukrainian troops to the limit and allow Russia to advance.
Earlier this month, Russian forces opened a front in the northeastern Kharkiv region, breaking through weak Ukrainian defenses in the area and quickly capturing a dozen settlements. Ukraine eventually managed to stop the Russian advance by slowly retreating to more fortified positions.
But to defend against Russian attacks, Ukrainian commanders have also had to rush to gather reserves and redeploy elite units to the northeast, weakening their positions in other parts of the front, such as in the eastern Donetsk region, where Moscow’s forces They are slowly advancing through bloody battles. sieges of cities and towns.
Serhii Kuzan, president of the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, a non-governmental research group, said: “Russia’s main goal is to expand the active front, disorganize the Ukrainian defense forces and deprive the Ukrainian command of the ability to use reserves “.
Kuzan added that forcing Ukraine to divert troops to the North would improve Russia’s prospects of capturing the Donetsk region, which Moscow formally annexed in 2022 but does not fully control. Military analysts say gaining full control of the region is a top priority for the Kremlin.
Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defense minister, told Reuters on Tuesday that Russia was concentrating thousands of troops preparing for a new impulse. “His goal is to open a new front in the north to start using all his manpower and firepower against us,” he said.
Ukrainian officials have warned for several days that Russia has massed about 10,000 troops across the border from the Sumy region, a force they say is not strong enough to capture major towns or cities but could immobilize Ukrainian units in the area.
Andriy Demchenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s border service, said this week that Russia was conducting reconnaissance missions there to expose the location of Ukrainian defenses.
“Attempts by subversive groups have been recorded along the entire border of the Sumy region,” Demchenko told Ukrainian media, adding that Russian troops could at some point “try to carry out actions similar to those we are seeing now in the area.” Kharkiv region”.
Ukrainian officials have complained in recent months that they cannot prevent the build-up of troops just across the border in Russian territory because allies have prohibited them from firing Western weapons at Russia. Their calls to lift that ban have had some success in recent days, as France; Poland; Sweden; and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have said kyiv should be allowed to attack military targets in Russia with such weapons.
The United States, the largest arms supplier to the Ukrainian government, has not agreed to lift the ban, although a debate has opened within the Biden administration about relaxing the terms.
For now, Ukraine must try to defend itself from Russian attacks along the entire front line. Russian troops have recently made marginal gains in the Donetsk region, according to battlefield maps compiled by independent analysts from satellite images and videos of the fighting. In particular, they have reached the eastern outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a Ukrainian stronghold that is one of Moscow’s main targets.
Capturing Chasiv Yar would give Russian forces control of command heights in the area and expose cities that Ukraine uses as logistics hubs to increased artillery fire.
General Syrsky said Thursday that Russia was supporting its ground attacks with air strikes, using powerful guided bombs known as glide bombs that can carry up to a ton of explosives and penetrate concrete bunkers. He said Ukraine urgently needed anti-aircraft weapons to shoot down the planes dropping the bombs.
Sweden said on Wednesday it would send more than $1 billion in military aid to Ukraine, its largest package yet, including air defense missiles along with surveillance and control aircraft capable of tracking fighter jets and bombers.
Ukraine’s “ability to identify targets at long range will be strengthened,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson wrote on social media.