Russia is stepping on the accelerator in its attempt to achieve strategic victories on the fronts in Ukraine. Although the biggest moves are taking place in the province of Donetsk (southeast), where Moscow is concentrating a large part of its attacks and is approaching the strategic cities of Toretsk and Pokrovsk, it has not by any means forgotten the region of Kharkov, further north and where the Ukrainian army is barely containing Russian pressure.
Russia occupied the territories north of Kharkiv and nearby Kupiansk, also in the east, at the beginning of its large-scale invasion in February 2022, but Ukraine managed to liberate them in September of that year. However, attempts to retake these strongholds have never ceased. Last May, the invading army broke through at two different points towards the towns of Vovchansk and Hliboke, on the border between the two countries. They have never retreated from the area around Kupiansk, a hundred kilometres east of Kharkiv.
Vitali Sarantsev, spokesman for the Army’s operational and tactical group in Kharkiv, warned on Friday that the situation was going to get worse: “The enemy is concentrating troops in the occupied areas and trying to advance.” He also said that Russia was preparing to open a third front in Sotnytskyi Kozachok, about 70 kilometers west of Vovchansk (and in the northwest of Kharkiv province) and also on the border between Ukraine and Russia. “They are sending intelligence units to decide when is the best time to attack,” he said.
In its daily analysis, the British intelligence service reported on Sunday that the average daily number of casualties among Russian forces has decreased over the past two months, and attributes this to the fact that this army is consolidating its positions on the Kharkov axis.
Over the past two days, Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleg Sinegubov has reported nine clashes in the direction of the regional capital, Ukraine’s second largest city, and stressed that street fighting continues in Vovchansk, which has been reduced to rubble, as neither side is able to control it. Ukraine has identified at least eight Russian air assault brigades, motorized riflemen and infantry in the vicinity. Two other tank units are stationed in the Russian town of Shebekino, 15 kilometers from the front, where a woman was killed on Sunday by a drone attack from Ukraine, according to Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. Meanwhile, two motorized rifle regiments are operating in the vicinity of Hliboke, as well as Russian mercenaries from the Africa Corps.
Knowing what’s happening outside means understanding what’s going to happen inside, so don’t miss anything.
KEEP READING
Sarantsev is concerned that Moscow is massing more troops on its territory, but at a sufficiently distant distance that Ukrainian forces cannot attack. “This will lead us to a situation like the one we had in May, when they retook Vovchansk and Hliboke. We knew what they were planning, but we couldn’t do anything because we didn’t have permission to attack at that distance,” he laments. The United States and its other allies did not authorize Ukraine to strike with weapons supplied by NATO partners inside Russia until late May, after Kiev insisted that Russian attacks from close to the border left it defenseless.
Faced with the possibility of a new escalation on this front, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stressed the need to launch long-range attacks on Russia. “Where the occupier is, from where Russia attacks Ukraine, from where it hits us with missiles, with [aviones de combate] Shahed and bombs. We need to be able to act with all the weapons that can be effective,” he insisted on his social networks this Saturday.
Kupiansk, half empty
The other front opened in Kharkiv is the Kupiansk front in the eastern part of the province. Russia has already launched 17 offensive operations in this direction, two of which are still ongoing, according to Governor Sinegubov.
Few of the 27,000 inhabitants that the city had before the war live in Kupiansk, but the streets are lined with buildings that have collapsed due to the bombing, and there are still women waiting at the bus stop, cars on the road and pedestrians walking along the main street. They are not exempt from risk, and at any moment the silence is interrupted by the roar of a missile impact. On 2 August, during the evacuation of civilians, a park in the centre was attacked with mortars just half an hour after the rescue team had passed by. One woman died and another was seriously injured. Anatoly Sadovdki, 67, is one of the evacuated citizens. “You go to sleep at night and you don’t know if you will wake up in the morning,” he says from the van of the NGO that has come to collect him. “I have not left until now because you don’t know where you will go, you don’t know what will become of you, you don’t want to leave your home,” sighs this man, a pensioner with a son living in Kharkiv whom he does not want to “disturb.” That is why he has decided to stay in a shelter for displaced people.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last May during an official visit to China that he was not planning to take Kharkiv, but rather that his intention was to create a cordon sanitaire to prevent Ukrainian attacks on the Russian city of Belgorod, 80 kilometres from the border and which Ukraine frequently attacks. Sarantsev believes that these advances are to give him a more advantageous position in the face of possible future negotiations. “They have already dropped more than 2,000 of these bombs here. We can clearly see that they are not slowing down their ambitions,” he says.
Meanwhile, kyiv has already begun using American missiles against targets on Russian territory, although the authorization obtained from its partners is insufficient, according to Sarantsev. “They are using Iskander missiles, among others, which cover a distance of about 400 kilometers. They launch them from within their country and unfortunately we do not have permission to fire that far. We can reach Belgorod, but not beyond,” he laments.
Meanwhile, the six F-16s delivered last week, out of the fifty that NATO secured for kyiv months ago, will still take some time to become operational and, in addition, are too small a number to make a difference on the war table.
On August 2, Kharkiv’s air raid alarms sounded 33 times in 24 hours. This is a normal rate, according to the citizens, who no longer flinch or run to shelters, as they did at the beginning of the invasion. What’s more, many choose to silence the notifications of the app alarms that every Ukrainian should have installed on their mobile phone. After more than two years of war, they have decided that they do not want to live at the expense of them.
In Kharkiv, these warnings rarely result in hits, because the air defenses of the armed forces are working. And because most of the attacks are aimed at small villages closer to the front lines. But that does not mean that there are no deaths every day and that the entire region and its inhabitants, who numbered two and a half million before the war, feel under immense pressure.
Follow all the international information atFacebook andXor inour weekly newsletter.
