Russian troops continued their advance into northeastern Ukraine on Saturday, closing in on a town about 10 miles outside Kharkiv, raising concerns that Ukraine’s second-largest city could soon come within range of Russian artillery.
The Ukrainian military said on Saturday that Russian forces attempted to breach its defenses near the village of Lyptsi, just north of Kharkiv. It said the attack was repulsed, but maps of the battlefield drawn up by independent groups analyzing publicly available footage of the battle showed Russian forces had almost reached the outskirts of the town.
Ukraine’s Khatia Brigade, which defends Lyptsi, posted a video on Telegram on Friday afternoon showing Russian soldiers advancing on foot into the village and attacking in small groups among the trees. The brigade said it targeted Russian troops with rockets and forced them to withdraw.
Russian forces opened a new front in northeastern Ukraine a week ago, quickly crossing the border and seizing about 10 settlements. Ukrainian officials and military analysts described it as an attempt to expand Ukraine’s already outnumbered military.
For example, the Khartia Brigade was redeployed from another hot spot on the front, around the southeastern town of Ocheretyne. Russian forces captured Ocheretyne last month, blowing a hole in Ukraine’s defenses.
But experts say another, perhaps more immediate, goal for Russia could be to advance deep enough into Ukrainian territory to push Kiev’s forces away from the border and create a buffer zone that prevents Ukraine from targeting Russian towns and cities with artillery. . President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday that that is the goal of the current offensive.
The buffer zone would allow Russian forces to get close enough to Kharkiv to fire artillery shells and expand Moscow’s campaign to inflict hardship on the city’s residents by striking residential areas and targeting power plants to cut off power. there is.
“A 10-15 km buffer zone would definitely cause problems for Kharkiv,” said Mykola Wieliskov, a military analyst at the Ukrainian government-run National Institute for Strategic Studies.
Further Russian advances would return Kharkiv, now home to about 1.2 million people, to the situation it faced in the first months of the war. By 2022, Russian troops had reached the outskirts of the city and hundreds of thousands of people had fled.
Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, explained that Russia’s move into the city was aimed at creating chaos and panic. But he reiterated there were no plans to evacuate residents this week. Instead, the city has served as a temporary shelter for thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have fled fighting in towns such as Lyptsi and Vovchansk further east.
However, Kharkiv is not completely safe. In recent months, Russia has increasingly targeted the city using powerful guided missiles known as glide bombs, which can carry hundreds of tons of explosives, and S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, which Moscow currently uses to attack ground targets. .
“It takes just a few minutes for an S-300 missile to reach Kharkiv,” Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Ilya Yevlash said in an interview this month. “We don’t have time to respond to these threats.”
Mr. Yevlash said only the U.S.-made Patriot air defense system can intercept S-300 missiles fired at short ranges, and that Ukraine does not have enough such missiles. “We can count them on one hand,” he said.
Ukrainian officials have urged their Western partners to send more. “Air defense is desperately needed to protect Kharkiv and other cities in northeastern Ukraine,” Andriy Yermak, director of President Volodymy Zelenskyy’s office, told The New York Times this week. “It’s time.”
Putin said Friday that Russian forces had no plans to take the city itself. Military experts also say Russia lacks the troops to carry out such an operation.
But getting closer to Kharkiv won’t be easy.
The Russians had so far passed through sparsely populated and poorly fortified areas. Once they enter Lyptsi, which had a pre-war population of 4,000 people and is dotted with houses and buildings, Russian troops face more difficult street fighting.
Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst at the Finnish Black Bird Group who analyzed satellite images and battlefield footage, mentioned a “long chain of villages” separating Lyptsi and Kharkiv on the social platform X. He said that if they advanced through them one by one, “the Russians would have to fight their way through over 17 kilometers of built-up area.”
Martina Stevis-Gridnev He contributed reporting from Brussels.