After air raid alarms all night, a weary Kharkiv woke up Saturday morning to gray, heavy skies and the disconcerting news that the Russian army continued to advance into neighboring Ukrainian territory.
Throughout the night, dull explosions from battlefields 65 kilometers away echoed in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Saturday morning, a day after Russian forces seized several villages along the border and in Ukraine. rushed reinforcements Across the region, the ghostly wail of air raid sirens continued to drift across the city’s deserted parks and long deserted boulevards.
Thousands of people are fleeing border areas and arriving in shelters in Kharkiv.
Tetiana Novikova is one of them.
Until Friday, she had spent all of her 55 years 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 bombings became so terrifying that she and her family made the painful decision to abandon the house they had lived in for decades. On Friday evening, she arrived with her elderly parents, shaken, hungry and a little lost, at a Kharkiv school transformed into a reception center for displaced people.
The only people left in Vovchansk, Ms. Novikova said, “are the elderly and the disabled, and they can’t move.”
“If a missile hits where they live,” she added, “the streets will be full of dead bodies.”
After more than two years of existence, the war in Ukraine continues to uncover new areas of misery.
At dawn Friday, Russian forces launched a complex assault that unleashed warplanes, heavy artillery, ground troops and armor on part of Ukraine’s northeastern border with Russia which was relatively calm. Russian troops crossed the border and captured several villages as well as a group of besieged Ukrainian soldiers, according to images widely shared on social media.
On Saturday, Russian forces were still shelling Vovchansk but there had been no major changes on the front line. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to have captured five border settlements 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 “counter-offensive measures” around from Vovchansk and another town, Lyptsi.
The Ukrainians called the border areas a “gray zone,” meaning the fighting was too intense and the situation too fluid to say who was in control.
Military analysts say 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 sewing the landscape with glistening barbed wire, mines and countless small cement pyramids that block tanks – “dragon’s teeth”, like the soldiers here call them.
But analysts agree that this attack comes at a particularly difficult time for Ukraine. His forces are depleted, exhausted and short of ammunition. Supplies from a long-delayed U.S. aid package are only beginning to arrive on the front lines, and Ukrainians are more vulnerable than they have been in months.
“It is likely that the coming weeks will be very bleak for Ukrainian ground forces in the east. » said Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and member of the Lowy Institute, a research group based in Sydney, in a first assessment of the offensive.
“Although the attacks currently appear to be small in scale,” he said, the aim is to “damage the morale of Ukrainians, both civilian and military.”
“If the Ukrainians decide to hold on at all costs, they will lose more members of their dwindling army,” he added.
The result, he said, could be “a severe test” and “one of the most difficult moments 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 fell deeper inside Ukrainian territory, according to Ukrainian media and the country’s Defense Ministry. Video footage widely broadcast on Ukrainian media channels revealed the aftermath in Vovchansk: fires, splintered trees and elegant cream-colored buildings trimmed in white, pierced with giant holes and their walls transformed into cascades of crumbling bricks.
With continued heavy shelling and uneven reports from the front, it was difficult to assess Saturday morning how much territory the Ukrainians might have lost. Some military analysts estimate that the Russian advance left them in control of at least 30 square kilometers.
U.S. officials remained hopeful that Ukrainian troops would eventually stop this Russian assault. Ukrainians have been preparing for this for months and President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening speech that Ukraine was sending reinforcements to the Kharkiv region.
Ukraine must nevertheless be careful in its response, given the weakness of its troops. Russian forces slowly but surely ate away at Ukrainian defenses 150 miles to the south, moving toward the small but strategically located old industrial city of Chassiv Yar. Recent reports indicate that Russian troops have moved 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 that area, Ukrainian military officials said.
The northern border villages, where the fighting is currently raging, have already been conquered in the past. Vovchansk has experienced the entire cycle of war: occupied by Russian troops after the large-scale invasion in February 2022, liberated in September 2022 and bombed sporadically since then.
Life there, in recent days, has become unbearable. There is no telephone, no electricity, and little food. All stores are closed. Even Ukrainian soldiers left, residents reported, although Ukrainian officials said their soldiers were managing to defend the city, perhaps from the outskirts.
“There is no going back,” Ms. Novikova said. “The Russians are destroying everything,” she said. “They are clearing the streets.”
As her family was holed up in their home Friday, she said a Russian aerial bomb destroyed a nearby school. The shock wave shattered windows and shook houses.
“And it’s just a bombshell,” she said. “They abandon dozens of them.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kharkiv, and Marc Santora And Constant Méheut from Kyiv, Ukraine.
