- Author, Jonathan Bell
- Role, BBC defense correspondent – Vovchansk
Denis Yaroslavsky, commander of a special Ukrainian reconnaissance unit, expressed extreme anger at what is happening in the city of Kharkiv.
The Ukrainian commander had participated in a Russian surprise attack targeting the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in the fall of 2022, which ended with Ukrainian forces successfully repelling the first Russian invasion along the border road.
However, he and his soldiers are currently facing the possibility of carrying out the same mission again, after Russian forces, in recent days, made limited but important gains along the border in the Kharkiv region.
The advance of the Russian forces was only a few miles, but they were able to control about 100 kilometers of Ukrainian territory, compared to what was witnessed in the more defended eastern region of Ukraine, which took Russia months to achieve the same results.
Russia says its forces have now entered the border town of Vovchansk, which is disputed by Ukraine.
Over the past few days, the city has been subjected to heavy bombardment, in addition to the evacuation of thousands of its residents.
Commander Denis wants to know what happened to Ukraine’s defenses.
He says: “There was no first line of defense. We saw that. The Russians entered directly. They entered directly without passing through minefields.”
Dennis showed me a drone video taken a few days ago that shows small lines of Russian troops easily crossing the border without being interrupted.
He says that Ukrainian officials had claimed that the defenses were built at great cost, but in his view, they were not there, and he believes this was due to “either negligence or corruption. It was not a failure, but a betrayal.”
Everyone knew that such a Russian incursion was likely to occur, and both Ukrainian and Western intelligence were aware that Russia was amassing forces across the border, with estimates of the strength of those forces being around 30,000 soldiers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin also announced earlier his goal of creating a buffer zone within the Kharkiv region to protect Russian territory from Ukrainian artillery strikes.
However, Ukraine did not appear to be well prepared, despite official denials on its part.
Speaking from a park in Kharkiv, Denis says he will return within an hour to the battlefront with his soldiers near the town of Vovchansk, just 5 kilometers from the Russian border.
Reports indicated that Russian forces had already entered the outskirts of the town, and Dennis told me that he feared that the Russians would soon take control of the situation.
We had visited the town before, and we met a local policeman named Oleksiy. He was helping residents who wanted to flee in search of safety. He was driving his car quickly to avoid Russian drones flying overhead as well as the constant artillery shelling.
The town’s population before the war was about 20 thousand people, most of whom left at the beginning of the war, and the number decreased to three thousand residents, but hundreds more left during the past days, and Oleksiy says: “Leaving now is easier, before they are killed or wounded.”
In Kharkiv, Russia is resorting to very familiar combat tactics in order to advance its forces, namely turning Ukrainian villages and towns into rubble. Oleksiy estimates that Russia is firing between 50 and 60 shells every hour at the city, in addition to glide bombs, which Russian planes fire at… Tens of kilometers from the front lines, beyond the range of Ukraine’s limited air defenses.
Russia launches about 100 glide bombs daily on a 1,000-kilometre-long front, and we heard six jet-like sounds over the course of an hour, followed by explosions that shook the ground.
I met Serhiy, whose house was destroyed by one of these slide bombs, and as he stood among the smoking rubble, he told me that his wife, Svetlana, had been seriously injured, and that he was treating his wounds from burns on his hands from the explosion.
He told me that he wanted to leave, but added: “What should I do?” He pointed to his three goats that he did not want to be killed in the battles, after they had miraculously survived along with his cat, and Serhiy is still clinging to his property.
Most of those remaining in Vovchansk are old and poor.
However, Oleksandr, who is 65 years old, was fed up. We saw him make the sign of the cross, leave the house where he grew up, touch the ground tenderly, pick up two bags, and take them to the police car.
He told me he wanted to go to Germany but he didn’t know how to get there.
Opening a new battle front here in the north is draining Ukraine’s limited resources, at a time when delayed US approval to send more military support has deprived Ukrainian forces of ammunition.
Ukraine was able, on average, to fire only one artillery shell for every ten Russian artillery shells, but the situation is slowly changing now, with the arrival of American support.
The Kharkiv attack also highlights problems that Ukraine itself has been very slow to address, including amassing a sufficient number of troops and building sufficient defense lines, as well as sending reinforcements to Kharkiv after they were withdrawn from other areas of the front and its limited reserves.
Ukrainian officials still insist that Kharkiv is not under threat of a ground invasion, but the further Russia advances, the more likely it is to come within range of Russian artillery.
Returning to the park in Kharkiv, Ukrainian Commander Denis says that he believes that Russian forces will try to focus on the east and seize the entire Donbass region, but he believes that Russia is also seeking to exploit Ukrainian weaknesses on the thousand-kilometer front, including Kharkiv.
“I’m angry, of course,” Dennis says. “When we were fighting for this land in 2022, we lost thousands of people, and we risked our lives.”
He adds: “And now, because there are no fortifications, we are losing people again.”
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