Russian troops continued their advance into northeastern Ukraine on Saturday, closing in on a village about 10 miles outside Kharkiv, raising concerns that Ukraine’s second-largest city could soon be within range of Russian artillery fire.
The Ukrainian Army said on Saturday that Russian troops were trying to breach defenses near the village of Lipchi, just north of Kharkiv. The attack was said to have been repelled, but battlefield maps compiled by an independent group analyzing released fighting footage showed Russian troops had almost reached the outskirts of the village.
The Ukrainian Hatiya Brigade, which is responsible for defending Liptsi, posted a video on Telegram on Friday afternoon that showed Russian soldiers advancing on the village on foot and attacking in small groups between tree lines. The brigade said it targeted the Russians with rockets, forcing them to retreat.
A week ago, Russian troops opened a new front in northeastern Ukraine, quickly crossing the border and quickly seizing about 10 settlements, a move that Ukrainian officials and military analysts said was an attempt to expand Ukraine’s already outnumbered forces.
The Khartia Brigade, for example, was redeployed from another hotspot on the front line, around the southeastern village of Ocheretyne. Russian troops captured Ocheretyn last month, breaching Ukraine’s defenses.
But experts say another, perhaps more immediate, goal for Russia could be to penetrate deep into Ukrainian territory to push Kiev troops away from the border and create a buffer zone that would prevent Ukrainians from targeting Russian towns with artillery. President Vladimir V. Putin said on Friday that this was the target of the current offensive.
The buffer zone could also allow the Russians to get close enough to Kharkiv to bombard it with artillery shells, escalating Moscow’s campaign to inflict misery on the city’s residents by air strikes on residential areas and targeting power stations to cut power.
“Such a 10- to 15-kilometer buffer zone will definitely cause problems in Kharkiv,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at Ukraine’s government-run National Institute for Strategic Studies.
Further Russian advances would return the city of Kharkiv, with a population of about 1.2 million, to the conditions it faced in the early months of the war. In 2022, Russian troops reached the city’s outer ring, causing hundreds of thousands of people to flee.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said Russia’s advance on the city was aimed at causing chaos and panic. But he reiterated this week that there were no plans to evacuate residents. Instead, the city became a temporary home for thousands of Ukrainian civilians who fled fighting in the region from villages such as Liptsi or Wovchansk further east.
However, Kharkov is not completely safe. In recent months, Russia has increasingly targeted the city with powerful guided missiles known as glide bombs, which can fire hundreds of tons of explosives, and S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, which Moscow is now using. missiles to attack ground targets.
“It only takes a few minutes for the S-300 missiles to reach Kharkiv,” Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Ilya Yevlash said in an interview this month. “There is no time to react to these threats.”
Yevrash said that only the U.S.-made Patriot air defense system can intercept short-range S-300 missiles, and Ukraine does not have sufficient air defense systems. “We can count them on the fingers of one hand,” he said.
Ukrainian officials have urged Western partners to send more supplies. “We desperately need air defense systems to protect Kharkiv” and other areas in northeastern Ukraine, Andrei Yermak, chief of staff to President Volodymy Zelensky, told The New York Times this week. City. “it’s time.”
Putin said on Friday that Russian troops had no plans to capture the city. Military experts also said that Russia lacks the power to conduct such operations.
However, getting close to Kharkov is not an easy task.
So far, Russian forces have broken through sparsely populated and weakly defended areas. Entering Lupusi, which had a pre-war population of 4,000 and was dotted with houses and buildings, would force the Russian army to engage in more difficult street fighting.
Analyst Emil Kastehelmi of the Finnish Blackbird Group, who analyzed satellite images and footage of the battlefield, noted on the social platform Cove separated. Pushing forward one by one, he said, “will force the Russians to fight within more than 17 kilometers of built-up areas.”
Martina Steeves Gridnev Reporting from Brussels.
