After an all-night air raid siren, a weary Kharkov awoke Saturday morning to dark gray skies and disconcerting news that Russian forces were continuing to advance into nearby Ukrainian territory.
Throughout the night, the muffled sounds of explosions from the battlefield 60 miles away echoed through Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city. The ghostly screams of air raid sirens echoed through the city's deserted parks and long stretches of traffic Saturday morning, a day after Russian troops seized several villages along the border and Ukraine rushed reinforcements to the area. It continued to echo down the empty boulevard.
Thousands of people have been evacuated from border areas and are arriving in evacuation centers in Kharkiv.
Tetyana Novikova is one of them.
Until Friday, she had lived for 55 years in Vovchansk, a small town near the Russian border. She was born there, married there, worked in a factory there, and raised her two children there.
But the shelling was so terrifying that she and her family made the difficult decision to abandon the home they had lived in for decades. On Friday evening, she and her elderly parents arrived at the Kharkiv school, which is now a reception center for displaced persons, shaken, hungry and a little lost.
Novikova said the only people left in Vovtyansk were “old people and disabled people who cannot move.”
“If missiles hit where they live, the streets would be full of corpses,” she added.
More than two years after it began, the war in Ukraine continues to discover new and tragic territory.
In the early hours of Friday, Russian forces launched a complex offensive involving fighter jets, heavy artillery, ground forces and armored forces against Russia's relatively peaceful border in northeastern Ukraine. According to images widely circulated on social media, Russian troops raided across the border and captured several villages and a group of besieged Ukrainian soldiers.
By Saturday, Russian troops were still bombarding Vovchansk, but there were no major changes on the front. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that it had captured five border settlements located along two main axes that Russian forces were believed to have pursued, but the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said Russian troops had fought a defensive battle and had captured Vovchansk. He said they were intensifying “counterattack measures” around another town, Lipsi.
Ukrainians called the border area the “gray zone.” This means that the fighting is too intense and the situation too fluid to say who is in control.
Military analysts believe that a new attack is unlikely to reach the streets of Kharkiv. The Ukrainian military has built elaborate defenses around the city, digging miles of trenches and stitching the terrain with glowing razor wire, mines and countless small cement pyramids that block tanks, but here… Soldiers call it “Dragon's Teeth.”
But analysts agree that the attack came at a particularly difficult time for Ukraine. Its forces are exhausted, stretched thin, and short on ammunition. Supplies from a long-delayed American aid package are just beginning to trickle to the front lines, leaving Ukrainians more vulnerable than they have been in months.
“The coming weeks are likely to be very difficult for Ukrainian ground forces in the east.” Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and researcher at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group, said in an initial assessment of the attack:
“The attack appears to be small at the moment, but its purpose is to demoralize Ukraine, both civilian and military,” he said.
“If the Ukrainians decide to hold their positions at all costs, they will lose even more of their increasingly small army,” he added.
The outcome could be a “severe test” and “one of the toughest periods of the war for Ukraine so far,” he said.
Russian military forces sent reconnaissance and sabotage forces across the border early Friday, followed by devastating artillery and aircraft bombing deep into Ukrainian territory, according to Ukrainian media reports and the country's Ministry of Defense. Video footage widely circulated on Ukrainian media channels revealed the aftermath of Vovtyansk. Fires, cracks in the trees, huge holes in the elegant cream-colored building trimmed in white, and the walls turned into cascades of tumbling bricks.
It was difficult to assess how much territory the Ukrainians had lost on Saturday morning as heavy shelling continued and reports from the front were spotty. Some military analysts estimate that the Russian advance has brought it under control of at least 30 square kilometers.
American officials remained hopeful that Ukrainian forces would eventually thwart this Russian attack. The Ukrainian side has been preparing for months, and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a speech overnight that Ukraine was sending reinforcements to the Kharkov region.
Still, Ukraine will have to be careful how it responds, given how short of its own military forces it is. Russian forces are slowly but surely breaking through Ukrainian defenses 150 miles to the south and advancing toward the small but strategically located old factory town of Chasiv Yar. According to recent reports, Russian forces have advanced close to a vital highway, nearly severing Ukraine's supply lines to the town. Ukrainian military officials say Russian forces attacked the northern border precisely to distract Ukrainian forces in the region.
The northern border village where fighting is currently intensifying has been the subject of previous battles. Vovtyansk was occupied by Russian forces after a full-scale invasion in February 2022, liberated in September 2022, and has been subject to sporadic shelling ever since, experiencing a full war cycle.
For the past few days, life there has become unsustainable. There are no telephones, no electricity, and little food. All shops are closed. Residents reported that even Ukrainian troops had withdrawn, but Ukrainian authorities said soldiers had managed to protect the town, likely from the outskirts.
“It's impossible to go back,” Novikova said. “The Russians are destroying everything,” she said. “They're erasing the streets.”
She said her family was holed up at home Friday when a Russian plane bomb destroyed a nearby school. The blast shattered windows and shook homes several blocks away.
“And it's just a bombshell,” she said. “They're dropping dozens.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kharkov. mark santora and Constant Mew Born in Kiev, Ukraine.