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2024-05-13 16:10:35
Only a few hundred residents remain in the besieged city of Vovchansk in northeastern Ukraine, where kyiv’s troops are locked in intense battles with the Russian army, according to local officials on Monday.
The city, whose population of 17,000 before the war, had already been reduced to only 2,500 In the days before Russia renewed its ground attack last week, it has become a focal point as pitched battles engulf the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions.
Local Ukrainian officials said they feared that Vovchansk’s fate could mirror that of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, Ukrainian towns where fierce fighting and scorched-earth tactics forced Ukrainians to retreat. There are only between 200 and 300 people left in the citysaid Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Suniehubov, as Moscow’s troops advance in an effort to encircle it from three directions.
Poorly built fortifications and persistent ammunition shortages allowed Russia’s sweeping advance in the area last week, local officials and soldiers said.
In the span of two days, Moscow has captured about 106 square kilometers (40 square miles) of at least seven towns, most of them already depopulated, according to the open-source monitoring project DeepState. It is a significant advance that could pin down Ukrainian forces in the northeast as intense fighting continues in the Donetsk region.
On Monday, Ukrainian troops were still engaged in pitched battles in both regions, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. They’re fighting near the border in eastern and northeastern Ukraine while Ukrainian soldiers, outgunned and outnumbered, try to stop a major Russian ground offensive.
“Defensive battles are fierce battles and ongoing in much of our border area,” Zelensky 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. It is unclear how much of the promised aid reached Ukraine.
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 to carry out what has largely become a war of attrition.
Ukraine’s General Staff said late Sunday that Russian forces had carried out at least 22 strikes in the previous 24 hours in two parts of the Kharkiv region and had “tactical successes.” The statement did not provide further details.
The Kharkiv raid likely serves three purposes for Russia. First, the operation in the northeast will tie down Ukrainian forces in the region and potentially draw precious reserves away from the intense battles in the Avdiivka and Chasiv Yar areas of the Donetsk region, where Russia’s advance has been much stronger. significant and strategically important.
Zelensky 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.
Zelensky 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.
Second, if Ukraine is unable to stop Moscow’s advance, it could create future conditions for a possible attack on the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest.
Finally, I could create a “buffer zone” to protect Belgorod, where frequent Ukrainian attacks have embarrassed the Kremlin. In March, Russia announced plans to evacuate some 9,000 children from the Belgorod region because it was continually being shelled.
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.
Yevgeny Poddubny, a normally well-connected military correspondent for the Russian state television corporation VGTRK, said in a recent post on Telegram that the assault on Kharkiv marked the beginning of “a new phase.”
“We are driving the enemy away from the border, destroying it to deprive the kyiv regime of the opportunity to use relatively cheap rockets to attack Belgorod,” he said.
(with information from AP)
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