Ukraine’s desperate struggle to defend Kharkiv

Anna sits in silence for most of the car journey from Kyiv to Kharkiv, her face contorted with worry. “The Russians come closer, closer, closer, but he’s just not listening to me,” she says. Anna made a point of visiting her 75-year-old father regularly, checking in on him at the simple brick house he built 45 years ago near Kharkiv’s glimmering Pechenihy reservoir, east of the city and close to the Russian border. This time, with the din of artillery in the background, she had come to persuade him to leave—to escape a Russian advance already enveloping Vovchansk, 25km to the north. After a hug and a few tears, the initial conversation does not go well. “The tv and radio say it can’t get worse,” insists Petro. “The Russians are losing. Sanctions, losses. Reinforcements are coming our way. They can’t come further.”

Ten days after the start on May 10th of Russia’s offensive in Kharkiv province, the pace of the advance has slowed. For now, Ukraine is holding the Russians roughly halfway through Vovchansk—a town, just 5km from the border, that is now being turned to ashes—and at positions roughly 9km inside Ukraine further west, near Lyptsi. With an estimated 48,000 troops ready, Russia does not have the forces for a major attack on Kharkiv city, Ukraine’s second biggest. But local military leaders insist that the situation remains precarious, and could change quickly. Russian columns were halted only after several experienced brigades were redeployed and came to the rescue, one says; Vladimir Putin will “surely” try his luck by opening a new attack elsewhere in the region.

A Russian column is already forming further north in Sudzha, on the other side of the border from Sumy, a regional capital north-west of Kharkiv. Ukraine’s army is also bracing for another strike just east of Vovchansk, towards the village of Bilyi Kolodiaz. Battles have also reactivated near Kupiansk, a railway hub, with Ukraine in effect losing control of the nearby village of Berestove on May 17th.

It is still too early to be sure about the eventual aims of the Russian operation. Also on May 17th Mr Putin declared that his only intention was to create a buffer zone between Ukraine and the border city of Belgorod, insisting there was “no plan” to threaten Kharkiv itself. But this possibly reflects evolving battleground realities rather than intentions. Retrieved military plans, details of which were shared with The Economist, suggest the Russians were probing to see if they could partially encircle Kharkiv and put pressure on the Ukrainian formations to the east of the Pechenihy reservoir. The operation was supposedly planned for May 15th-16th but was brought forward by nearly a week for unknown reasons.

According to the plans, the Russians had identified two axes of attack on either side of the reservoir. The push on the western axis was intended, over 72 hours, to bring Russian troops to within artillery range of Kharkiv city at the village of Borshchova. They were stopped by a rapidly redeployed grouping from the elite 92nd Brigade, which pushed them back a full 10km from their initial goal. But up until that moment, the story had been about Ukraine’s poor defensive fortifications, about how the 125th Brigade that should have repelled the attack in fact fled from positions while under pressure, and about serious Ukrainian losses.

On the Vovchansk axis, further east, the Russian plan had been to fight past Anna’s father’s house on the reservoir, right down to the town of Pechenihy. The Russians initially made quick work of this operation, sweeping through an area that should have been prepared with minefields and serious engineering fortifications but wasn’t. “They were just simply allowed to walk through,” complains Denys Yaroslavsky, a special-forces officer whose social media posts on May 12th alerted the outside world to the possibility of a wider reverse. “We were watching them cut through the border fence on screens at about 11pm on May 9th, and I said to my men to watch how they would blow themselves up on mines. There were no explosions; they simply carried on.”

Many of the soldiers in Kharkiv are angry that Russia was able to advance so far so quickly. Some of them criticise delays in Western aid, which they believe encouraged Russian aggression and weakened Ukrainian defences. Others suspect that incompetence, or even treachery, played a more significant role. Conspiracy theories to the effect that politicians in Kyiv or Washington may be selling Kharkiv down the river ahead of an ugly peace deal are also circulating. Official Ukrainian narratives that present a rosy picture are not helping to calm nerves. “[President Volodymyr] Zelensky is being kept in a warm bath,” complains Mr Yaroslavsky. “We think the president should tune into the situation on the ground and not ape Putin, a man whose life revolves around the papers his aides bring him.” A government official, who asked to remain anonymous, suggests that Mr Zelensky had already sensed he might not be receiving the full truth. “That’s what he yells at his generals, at least.”

Oleksandr Husarov, the head of the Pechenigi municipality, says optimistic news reports about Ukrainian strength have themselves created different problems in the effort to evacuate people from towns near Vovchansk. When the Russians seized much of the area at the start of the war in 2022, the occupation was not as harsh as in other areas of Ukraine. Some mistakenly believe the occupation will be mild if it happens this time round too, says Mr Husarov. Even the most stubborn can be “shaken out” of that belief when they see the “burned earth” left behind by Russian glide bombs and drones, he adds. But Anna’s father remains unconvinced. Petro insists he was lucky to be home when a Russian Shahed drone smashed into it in early March; that way, he could put out the fire. He won’t be preparing an emergency suitcase, he tells his increasingly exasperated daughter, who is packing up mementoes of her childhood—documents, photographs, an antique floral table service—into carrier bags. “All of Ukraine is exploding,” he says. “Besides, where would I go?” ■

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