Kyiv, Ukraine – Due to the incessant and crackling cannonade around him, the policeman had to shout.
“The enemy is taking up positions on the streets of Vovchansk, so people must be evacuated,” the bearded officer in bulletproof vest and helmet urged residents of the Ukrainian city, which is near the border with Russia.
Their call was filmed and posted on Telegram on Wednesday. As Russia's war against Ukraine escalates, she has been viewed more than 13,000 times since.
Vovchansk is an industrial city in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, located just 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Russian border and has been under attack since Friday.
That's when Russian forces began their two-pronged incursion into the region, seizing nearly a dozen villages in a matter of days.
With its apartment buildings and factories that can be defended by small groups of military, Vovchansk is a tougher nut to crack.
The Russians are still trying to seize a disused airfield and a Soviet-era slaughterhouse that could serve as a base for future advances.
The second direction of their offensive began at the border town of Liptsy, about 50 kilometers (31 mi) west of Vovchansk.
It is located on a road leading to the regional capital, also called Kharkiv.
Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, with a pre-war population of 1.5 million, has been bombed almost non-stop in recent months.
So far, the raid is Russia's largest ground attack against Ukraine since August 2022, when the Ukrainian military expelled the invaders from most of the Kharkiv region.
“This is a successful combat reconnaissance, they advanced at the tactical level,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow wants to create a “sanitary zone” in Kharkiv to protect Russia's Belgorod region north of it, which has been heavily bombed by Ukrainian forces.
And although Ukrainian intelligence reported weeks ago that the Russians would attack the region, Ukrainian forces failed to create a stable defense line to prevent the invasion, Romanenko said.
“The situation there is difficult,” he said.
But so far, the Russians do not appear to have enough forces: at least 150,000 military personnel are needed to lay siege to the city of Kharkiv, as their current contingent along the border is about three times smaller, Romanenko said.
Moscow, however, is carrying out a “hidden mobilization” of hundreds of thousands of men and could deploy larger forces to seize Kharkiv in late May or early June, he said.
“We can gather resources, form a defense system and thwart their attack plan,” he said.
Moscow's advance in Kharkiv may seem worrying, but “given the challenges facing Russia, they are unlikely to lead to operationally significant penetration and exploitation,” retired NATO General Gordon “Skip” Davis Jr. told Al Jazeera.
Russia has deployed a significant number of combat vehicles toward Kharkiv supported by intense air support with the apparent intent of pinning Ukrainian forces in the north to allow advances southward, he said.
“These advances would allow Russian forces to gain territory from illegally annexed regions that remain under Ukrainian control,” he said.
Russia's air superiority
One of the factors of its success is the undisputed air superiority since the war began in 2022.
The ground assault is supported by Russian bombers dropping heavy gliding bombs capable of destroying even the most fortified buildings.
These bombs played a crucial role in Moscow's recent advances in the eastern Donetsk region.
Ukraine got rid of most of its Soviet-era air force and transferred all of its strategic bombers to Russia in the late 1990s as payment for its natural gas debts.
Western powers have agreed to supply several dozen F-16 fighter jets, but the first six are not expected until the summer.
Another major obstacle is the taboo on the use of NATO-supplied weapons on Russian territory, as Western leaders fear antagonizing Putin.
Moscow's troops are therefore “exploiting adjacent Russian land and airspace that have essentially become a sanctuary from long-range fire and munitions systems provided by the West,” Davis said.
“It is time for Western leaders to remove these externally imposed restrictions and allow Ukraine to defend itself effectively with all available means.”
The U.S. Helsinki Commission, a human rights group, said Wednesday that the White House “should not only allow but encourage the Ukrainian military to attack Russian forces that are shooting and conducting operations on Russian borders and share information.” of intelligence to avoid massive loss of life.
The White House appears to be faltering.
“We have not encouraged or enabled attacks outside Ukraine, but ultimately Ukraine has to make decisions for itself about how it will conduct this war,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the Russian military pays a high price for its success.
Those who refused to participate in front-line attacks on Ukrainian trenches (which typically left almost no survivors) were killed by other Russian military personnel, according to Kyrylo Sazonov, a Ukrainian military analyst.
Sazonov published on his Telegram channel the written denials found on the bodies of four Russian servicemen killed near the village of Staritsa.
Ukrainian counterattacks forced the Russians to abandon the village of Zelene, located on the road to the city of Kharkiv.
“In this segment of 'Russia's great advance towards Kharkov' its speed dropped almost to zero,” military analyst Konstantin Mashovets wrote on Telegram on Thursday.
Western analysts agree with him.
The speed of Moscow's offensive in Kharkiv “continues to slow after Russian forces initially seized areas that Ukrainian officials have now confirmed were less defended,” the Institute for the Study of War, a group, said Thursday. of experts.
However, many Kharkiv residents feel disoriented and scared.
“This seems like a recurring nightmare,” said Oleksandra Bondarenko, a 42-year-old sales assistant who fled Kharkiv in 2022 to settle in kyiv with her teenage daughter and two cats.
“Europe and the United States are arguing about whether they should give us planes or missiles, voting on military aid, and the Russians just won't stop,” he told Al Jazeera outside the central Kiev grocery store where he works, smoking nervously. a cigarette. .
“Democracy does not seem to work during a war and, for us, this means endless losses.”
