Russia on Saturday said it had captured six villages in Ukraine’s east after launching a surprise ground offensive that prompted mass evacuations.
The defense ministry said its troops had “liberated” five villages in the Kharkiv region near the border with Russia — Borisivka, Ogirtseve, Pletenivka, Pylna and Strilecha — “as a result of offensive actions.” The village of Keramik in the Donetsk region was also now under Russian control, it said.
Ukrainian officials said Russian forces made small advances in the area it was pushed back from nearly two years ago, the latest in a series of gains as Ukrainian forces find themselves outgunned and outmanned.
“A total of 1,775 people have been evacuated,” Kharkiv governor Oleg Synegubov wrote on social media. He reported Russian artillery and mortar attacks on 30 settlements over the past 24 hours.
Meanwhile, Russian forces opened a heavy assault on Ukraine’s northeast Kharkiv region, prompting Kyiv to send reinforcements on Friday to defend its border — and territory that had been occupied and liberated — even as Kyiv’s troops are already outnumbered and losing ground across other sections of the front line.
The attack started at about 5 a.m. on Friday, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said in a statement, with intense aerial bombardment and shelling followed by armoured columns trying to break through at several points along the border.
“As of now, these attacks have been repelled,” the ministry claimed in its statement. But Russia’s assault appeared to be continuing, with residents in some areas reporting some of the heaviest shelling they have witnessed since the start of the invasion in February 2022, and it was impossible to assess fully the state of the battlefield along the eastern front or to verify the ministry’s assertion.
A Ukrainian defense official said Russia’s aim in the Kharkiv region might be to create a buffer zone some six miles deep into Ukraine to limit Kyiv’s ability to shell Russian villages across the border.
Kharkiv lies adjacent to Russia’s Belgorod region, which has come under repeated attacks — making it one of the few areas in Russia were residents feel the direct and persistent impact of a war that has destroyed Ukrainian cities and displaced millions of Ukrainians.—Agencies
