Kyiv, Ukraine. Ukrainian troops are locked in intense battles with the Russian army advancing in two border areas, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while the death toll from the collapse of a Russian apartment building attributed to Ukrainian shelling rose to 15.
Zelenskyy said “fierce battles” are being fought near the border in eastern and northeastern Ukraine as outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers try to push back a major Russian ground offensive.
“Defensive battles are fierce and ongoing battles in much of our border area,” Zelenskyy said in his late-night video address on Sunday.
Kremlin forces aim to exploit Ukraine’s weaknesses before a large batch of new military aid for kyiv from the United States and European partners hits the battlefield in the coming weeks and months, analysts say. That makes this period a window of opportunity for Moscow and one of the most dangerous for kyiv in the two years of war, they say.
The new Russian advance in the northeastern Kharkiv region, along with the ongoing advance into the eastern Donetsk region, comes after months in which the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line barely moved. Meanwhile, both sides have used long-range attacks in what has largely become a war of attrition.
The raid on Kharkiv may be an attempt to create a “buffer zone” to protect Belgorod, an adjacent Russian border region hit by Ukrainian attacks.
Russian emergency services on Monday finished clearing debris in the region’s capital city of Belgorod, where a section of a residential building collapsed following what authorities said was a Ukrainian shelling.
Fifteen bodies were pulled from the rubble, Belgorod regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said, and another 27 people were injured.
Three other people in the city of Belgorod were killed in the shelling on Sunday night, he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin replaced Sergei Shoigu as defense minister on Sunday in a cabinet reshuffle. Shoigu was widely seen as a key figure in Putin’s decision to send Russian troops to Ukraine in February 2022. Russia hoped that the operation would quickly overwhelm Ukraine’s military and that Russian troops would be widely welcomed by Ukrainians.
Zelenskyy said fighting in the Donetsk area “is no less intense” than in Kharkiv. He said the Kremlin aimed to “distribute our forces” by opening a second active front in Kharkiv.
He described the area around the Pokrovsk region, just inside the Ukrainian border in Donetsk, as “the most difficult.”
Pokrovsk was a town of around 60,000 before the war and until recently was a two-hour drive from the front line. Now it is less than half.
The capture of the Donetsk town of Avdiivka in February opened a door for Kremlin troops to advance westward, deeper into Donetsk. Russia illegally annexed Donetsk and three other regions in 2022, shortly after invading Ukraine, and taking control of all of Donetsk is one of the Kremlin’s main war goals.
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