After a night of air-raid warnings, a tired Kharkiv woke up Saturday morning to dark skies and disturbing images of Russian troops continuing to advance into nearby Ukrainian territory.
Throughout the night, dull explosions from the battlefield 40 miles away echoed through Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Russian troops seized several villages along the border on Saturday morning and Ukraine sent reinforcements to the area, a day after the ghostly wail of air-raid sirens continued to waft through the city’s deserted parks and long, empty boulevards superior.
Thousands of people fled the border area and reached shelters in Kharkiv.
Tetiana Novikova is one of them.
Until Friday, she had spent 55 years in Wolfchansk, a small town near the Russian border. She was born there, married there, worked in a factory there and raised her two children there.
But the shelling became so horrific that she and her family made the painful decision to abandon the house they had lived in for decades. On Friday night, she arrived with her elderly parents at a school in Kharkiv that had been turned into a reception center for displaced people, shaken, hungry and a little lost.
Ms Novikova said the only residents left in Wovchansk were “elderly and disabled people who are unable to move.”
“If the missile hits where they live,” she added, “the streets will be filled with bodies.”
For more than two years, the war in Ukraine continues to bring new areas of suffering.
Russian forces launched a complex offensive at dawn on Friday, using fighter jets, heavy artillery, ground troops and armor, on a relatively peaceful stretch of northeastern Ukraine on its border with Russia. Russian troops rushed across the border and seized several villages and a group of embattled Ukrainian soldiers, according to images widely circulated on social media.
As of Saturday, Russian forces were still shelling Wovchansk, but there were no major changes to the front lines. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have captured five border settlements along two main axes, which Moscow’s military appeared to have tracked, but Ukraine’s General Staff said its troops were targeting Vovchansk and another town. Defensive fighting and “counter-offensive measures” were carried out around Pucci.
Ukrainians refer to the border area as a “grey zone,” meaning the fighting is too intense and the situation too unstable to determine who is in control.
Military analysts believe the new offensive is unlikely to reach the streets of Kharkov. The Ukrainian army built intricate fortifications around the city – digging miles of trenches and stitching the ground with gleaming barbed wire, mines and countless small cement pyramids to block tanks – soldiers here call them “dragon’s teeth” .
But analysts agree that the attack came at a particularly difficult time for Ukraine. Its troops were exhausted, stretched thin, and running low on ammunition. Supplies from a long-delayed U.S. aid package are just beginning to flow to the front lines, and Ukrainians are more vulnerable than they have been in months.
“The next few weeks are likely to be very serious for Ukrainian ground forces in the east,” Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and researcher at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, said in his preliminary assessment of the offensive.
“Although the scale of the current attack appears to be small,” he said, its purpose was to “undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and military.”
“If the Ukrainians decide to hold their ground at all costs, they will lose more of their increasingly smaller army,” he added.
He said the outcome could be a “severe test” and “one of Ukraine’s most difficult moments in the war so far.”
Russian forces sent reconnaissance and sabotage forces into Ukraine early on Friday, followed by a devastating artillery bombardment and dropped bombs deep into Ukraine, according to Ukrainian news reports and the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. Video footage circulated widely by Ukrainian media channels revealed the aftermath in Wovchansk: fires, broken trees and elegant beige buildings decked out in white with huge holes and walls transformed into waterfalls of billowing bricks.
It was difficult to assess how much territory the Ukrainians may have lost on Saturday morning as heavy shelling continued and reports from the front were mixed. Some military analysts estimate that the Russian advance puts them in control of at least 30 square kilometers.
U.S. officials remain hopeful that Ukrainian forces will eventually be able to thwart a Russian attack. Ukrainians have been preparing for this for months, with President Zelensky saying in a nighttime speech that Ukraine was sending reinforcements to the Kharkiv region.
Still, Ukraine must be cautious about its response, given how stretched its forces are. Russian forces have been slowly but steadily encroaching on Ukrainian defenses 150 miles to the south, heading toward the small but strategically located old factory town of Chasiv Yar. Recent reports indicate that Russian forces have closed in on a vital highway, all but cutting off Ukrainian supply lines to the town. Ukrainian military officials said Russia’s attack on the northern border region was aimed at distracting Ukrainian forces in the area.
The northern border villages where fighting is now raging have been fought over before. Wovchansk has gone through a full war cycle – occupied by Russian forces after a full-scale invasion in February 2022, liberated in September 2022 and sporadic shelling since then.
Life there has become untenable in recent days. There was no phone service or electricity and little food. All shops are closed. Even Ukrainian soldiers have left, residents reported, although Ukrainian officials said their soldiers were trying to defend the town, perhaps from the outskirts.
“It’s impossible to go back,” Ms. Novikova said. “The Russians are destroying everything,” she said. “They’re clearing the streets.”
On Friday, as her family holed up in their home, she said a Russian plane bomb destroyed a nearby school. The shock wave shattered windows and shook houses blocks away.
“It was just a bomb,” she said. “They’re going down by the dozens.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kharkov, and Mark Santora and Constant Mecht From Kiev, Ukraine.
