Kyiv, Ukraine – Because of the incessant and crackling cannonade around him, the police officer had to shout.
“The enemy is taking up positions on the streets of Vovchansk, so people should be evacuated,” the bearded officer, wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet, urged residents of the Ukrainian city, which is close to the border with Russia.
Their call was filmed and posted on Telegram on Wednesday. As Russia’s war against Ukraine escalates, the video has since been viewed more than 13,000 times.
Vovchansk is an industrial city in the northeast region of Kharkiv, which is just 5 km from the border with Russia and has been under attack since Friday.
It was then that Russian forces began their two-pronged attack on the region and captured almost a dozen villages in a few days.
With its apartment buildings and factories that can be defended by small groups of military personnel, Vovchansk is a tough nut to crack.
The Russians are still trying to seize an unused airfield and a Soviet-era slaughterhouse that could serve as a base for further advances.
The second direction of the offensive began at the border town of Liptsy, about 50 km (31 mi) west of Vovchansk.
It is on a highway leading to the regional capital, also called Kharkiv.
Ukraine’s second-largest city, with a pre-war population of 1.5 million, Kharkiv has been bombed almost non-stop in recent months.
So far, the attack is Russia’s largest ground assault on Ukraine since August 2022, when the Ukrainian military expelled invaders from most of the Kharkiv region.
“This is successful combat reconnaissance, they advanced at a tactical level,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow wants to create a “sanitary zone” in Kharkiv to protect Russia’s northern region of Belgorod, which has been heavily shelled by Ukrainian forces.
And although Ukrainian intelligence reported weeks ago that the Russians would attack the region, Ukrainian forces were unable to create a stable line of defense to prevent the invasion, Romanenko said.
“The situation there is difficult,” he said.
But so far, the Russians do not appear to have enough forces – at least 150,000 troops are needed to besiege the city of Kharkiv, as their current contingent along the border is about three times smaller, Romanenko said.
Moscow, however, is conducting a “hidden mobilization” of hundreds of thousands of men and could mobilize larger forces to take Kharkiv by the end of May or beginning of June, he said.
“We can pool resources, form a defense system and thwart their plan of attack,” he said.
Moscow’s pressure on Kharkiv may seem worrying, but “given the challenges Russia faces, it is unlikely to lead to operationally important penetration and exploitation,” retired NATO general Gordon “Skip” Davis Jr. told Al Jazeera .
Russia deployed a significant number of combat vehicles toward Kharkiv, backed by intense air support, in an apparent attempt to pin down Ukrainian forces in the north to allow advances south, he said.
“These advances would allow Russian forces to gain territory from the illegally annexed regions that remain under Ukrainian control,” he said.
Russia’s air superiority
One of the factors of its success is its undisputed air superiority since the start of the war in 2022.
The ground attack is supported by Russian bombers that drop heavy glide bombs capable of destroying even the most fortified buildings.
These bombs played a crucial role in Moscow’s recent conquests in the eastern region of Donetsk.
Ukraine got rid of most of its Soviet-era air force, transferring all of its strategic bombers to Russia in the late 1990s as payment for natural gas debts.
Western powers have agreed to supply several dozen F-16 fighter jets, but the first six are not expected until the summer.
Another major obstacle is the taboo on the use of NATO-supplied weapons on Russian territory, as Western leaders are afraid of antagonizing Putin.
Therefore, Moscow troops “are exploiting adjacent Russian lands and airspace that have essentially become a sanctuary for Western-supplied long-range fire and munitions systems,” Davis said.
“It is time for Western leaders to remove these externally imposed restrictions and allow Ukraine to defend itself effectively with all available means.”
The U.S. Helsinki Commission, a human rights group, said Wednesday that the White House “should not only permit but encourage the Ukrainian military to attack Russian forces by firing and deploying on Russian borders, and share information to prevent massive loss of life.”
The White House appears to be wavering.
“We have not encouraged or permitted attacks outside of Ukraine, but ultimately Ukraine must make decisions for itself about how it will conduct this war,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday.
However, the Russian military pays a high price for its success.
Those who refused to participate in front-line attacks on Ukrainian trenches — which typically leave almost no survivors — were killed by other Russian military personnel, according to Kyrylo Sazonov, a Ukrainian military analyst.
Sazonov posted on his Telegram channel written refusals that were found on the bodies of four Russian servicemen killed near the village of Staritsa.
Ukrainian counterattacks forced the Russians to leave the village of Zelene, which is on the way to the city of Kharkiv.
“In this segment of ‘Russia’s great advance towards Kharkiv’, its speed dropped almost to zero,” military analyst Konstantin Mashovets wrote on Telegram on Thursday.
Western analysts agree with him.
The speed of Moscow’s offensive in Kharkiv “continues to slow after Russian forces initially seized areas that Ukrainian authorities have now confirmed were less defended,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, said on Thursday.
Many Kharkiv residents, however, feel disoriented and scared.
“It feels like a recurring nightmare,” said Oleksandra Bondarenko, a 42-year-old sales assistant who fled Kharkiv in 2022 to settle in Kiev with her teenage daughter and two cats.
“Europe and America are discussing whether to give us planes or missiles, voting on military aid, and the Russians just won’t stop,” she told Al Jazeera outside the grocery store in central Kiev where she works, nervously smoking a cigarette. .
“Democracy doesn’t seem to work during a war, and for us that means endless losses.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
