Kyiv, Ukraine – Due to the incessant and crackling cannon fire he received, the policeman had to scream.
“The enemy is taking up positions in the streets of Vovchansk, so other people will have to be evacuated,” a bearded officer, dressed in a bulletproof vest and helmet, suggested to the citizens of the Ukrainian city, located near the Russian border.
Their call was filmed and posted on Telegram on Wednesday. As Russia’s war against Ukraine intensifies, this video has been viewed more than 13,000 times since then.
Vovchansk is a commercial city in the northeastern Kharkiv region, just five kilometers from the Russian border and has been attacked since Friday.
That’s when Russian forces began their double incursion into the domain, capturing about a dozen villages in a matter of days.
With its apartment buildings and factories that can be defended by small teams of soldiers, Vovchansk is a more complicated puzzle to solve.
The Russians are still looking for a disused airfield and a Soviet-era slaughterhouse that could serve as a base for further advances.
The second direction of their offensive began in the border town of Liptsy, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Vovchansk.
It is on a road leading to the regional capital, also 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 incursion is Russia’s largest ground attack on Ukraine since August 2022, when the Ukrainian military drove invaders out of most of the Kharkiv region.
“This is a successful combat recognition, complex at the tactical level,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, a former deputy chief of staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow needs to create a “health zone” in Kharkiv in Russia’s northern Belgorod region, which has been heavily shelled by Ukrainian forces.
And while Ukrainian intelligence announced a few weeks ago that the Russians would attack the region, Ukrainian forces have failed to create a solid line of defense to save the invasion, Romanenko said.
“It’s hard,” he said.
But so far, the Russians don’t seem to have enough forces: At least 150,000 army workers are needed to lay siege to the city of Kharkiv, with its existing contingent along the border about three times smaller, Romanenko said.
Moscow, however, is conducting a “hidden mobilization” of thousands of troops and could deploy larger forces to Kharkiv in late May or early June, he said.
“We can marshal resources, devise a defense formula and thwart their offensive plan,” he said.
Moscow’s advance in Kharkiv may seem ominous, but “given the demanding situations facing Russia, they are unlikely to lead to operationally significant penetration and exploitation,” retired NATO Gen. Gordon “Skip” Davis Jr. told Al Jazeera.
Russia has used a significant number of combat vehicles in the direction of Kharkiv, subsidized through intense air support, with the obvious aim of pinning down Ukrainian forces in the north to allow a southward advance, he explained.
“These advances would allow Russian forces to gain territory in illegally annexed regions that remain under Ukrainian control,” he said.
One of the points of their luck has been the undisputed air superiority since the start of the war in 2022.
The attack on the ground is supported by Russian bombers that drop heavy bombs capable of destroying even the most fortified buildings.
These bombs have played a role in Moscow’s recent advances in the eastern Donetsk region.
Ukraine got rid of most of its Soviet-era air force and moved all of its strategic bombers to Russia in the late 1990s as payment for its natural fuel debts.
Western powers have agreed to supply several dozen F-16 fighter jets, but the first six are expected to arrive by this summer.
Another main impediment is the taboo on the use of NATO-supplied weapons on Russian territory, as Western leaders fear antagonizing Putin.
As a result, Moscow’s troops are “exploiting the land and adjacent Russian airspace that necessarily has a sanctuary of Western-supplied ammunition and long-range firing systems,” Davis said.
“It is time for Western leaders to remove restrictions imposed from abroad and allow Ukraine to protect itself well with all available means. “
The U. S. Helsinki Commission, a human rights group, said Wednesday that the White House “must not only authorize but also inspire the Ukrainian armed forces to attack Russian forces who are firing and sharing intelligence to prevent heavy loss of life. “”.
The White House seems hesitant.
“We have not encouraged or allowed departures from Ukraine, but at the end of the day, Ukraine will have to make decisions for itself about how it will fight this war,” U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the Russian military is paying a heavy price for its success.
Those who refused to take part in the frontline attacks on Ukrainian trenches, which leave virtually no survivors, were killed by other Russian servicemen, according to Kyrylo Sazonov, a Ukrainian military analyst.
Sazonov posted on his Telegram channel the written denials found on the bodies of 4 Russian servicemen killed near the village of Staritsa.
Ukrainian counterattacks forced the Russians to abandon the village of Zelene, on the road leading to the city of Kharkiv.
“As far as Russia’s ‘breakthrough into Kharkiv’ is concerned, its speed has dropped to almost zero,” army 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 first seized spaces that Ukrainian officials have now shown were less defended,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, said on Thursday.
Many Kharkiv residents, however, are disoriented and scared.
“It seems like a recurring nightmare,” says Oleksandra Bondarenko, a 42-year-old saleswoman 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 will give us planes or missiles, voting on military aid, and the Russians will possibly not stop,” he told Al Jazeera outside the grocery store in central Kyiv where he works, nervously breathing in a cigarette.
“Democracy doesn’t seem to work in times of war, and for us that means endless losses. “