As fighting continued to flare up along the Russia-Ukraine border on Saturday, civilians fleeing for their lives stepped out of evacuation trucks one by one, some unsteadily on their feet.
An elderly woman wrestles with two large, confused dogs. A boy clutches his birth certificate, pressed and frayed. An older couple grumbled to each other about who would carry their heavy bag. Another woman gingerly carried a steel cage containing a bright green parrot.
Even the bird inside, which brought a bit of color to the gloomy scene, seemed to be trying to escape the shelling, said woman Natasha Radchenko.
“He was shaking,” she said. “And hide.”
After two long years, the war in Ukraine continues to find new areas of suffering.
Over the past two days, thousands of civilians who were already going through extremely difficult times were finally forced to flee their homes in northeastern Ukraine after the Russians opened a new front.
At dawn on Friday, the Russian military launched a complex offensive using aircraft, artillery, infantry and armored vehicles, crossing the border near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. By all accounts – and by the rumble of giant bombs falling to the ground not far from the evacuation point – the two sides are now fighting fiercely over a string of villages just a few miles from Ukrainian territory.
By Saturday night, it was still unclear who won. Russia’s Defense Ministry claims to have captured five border settlements, which Ukraine denies, although an independent military analyst says geolocated footage shows drone attacks Ukrainian drones targeting supposed Russian armored vehicles actually crossed the border. Ukrainian officials say they are counterattacking and that Russian troops have advanced no more than three miles beyond the border.
Military analysts said they believe the attack may be part of a cunning Russian strategy, not necessarily to open a new line of attack into Kharkov but to draw Ukrainian forces from the battlefields another, where the Ukrainian army was already exhausted and stretched thin.
“It is likely that the coming weeks will be very grim for Ukrainian ground forces in the east,” he said. said Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and member of the Lowy Institute, a research group based in Sydney. Initial evaluation of attack.
“While the current attacks appear to be small in scale, the aim is to reduce the morale of Ukrainians – both civilian and military,” he said.
“If the Ukrainians decide to hold their ground at all costs, they will lose more and more small armies,” Mr. Ryan added.
The result, he said, could be “a serious test” and “one of the most difficult moments for Ukraine in the war so far.”
Military analysts say the new attack is unlikely to reach the streets of Kharkiv. The Ukrainian army has built elaborate defenses around the city – digging miles of trenches and peppering the landscape with glistening barbed wire, mines and countless small cement pyramids that block tanks – “teeth”. dragons,” as the soldiers here call them. Ukrainian officials, from President Volodymyr Zelensky down, also said they were rushing to reinforce the situation.
However, Ukraine must be careful in how it reacts because its military is depleted. Supplies from a long-delayed US aid package are only just starting to arrive on the front lines, leaving Ukrainians more vulnerable than in previous months.
Russian forces have been slowly but steadily penetrating Ukraine’s defenses 250 miles south of Kharkiv, moving toward the small but strategically located Ukrainian industrial town. Chasiv Yar. Recent reports indicate that Russian troops have moved close enough to a key highway to nearly cut off Ukraine’s supply lines. Ukrainian military officials said the Russians attacked the northern border region precisely to distract Ukrainian forces in the area, but they insisted that it was ineffective.
The northern border villages where fighting is fierce have happened before. The small town of Vovchansk has been through the entire war cycle – occupied by Russian troops after a full-scale invasion in February 2022, liberated that September and subjected to sporadic shelling ever since.
The video, widely circulated on Ukrainian media channels, revealed the consequences of the past two days of non-stop bombing: fires burning in the streets of Vovchansk, shattered trees, abandoned, roofless houses and abandoned buildings. Elegant cream-colored building with giant holes through it, deformed walls. into streams of falling bricks.
This is the scene of the attack where everyone is running away. At least three people were killed and residents said it would be a miracle if more people were not killed. Until Friday afternoon, Tetiana Novikova had lived all 55 years in Vovchansk. She was born there, married there, worked in a factory there and raised her two children there.
But the shelling became so terrifying that she and her family had to make the painful decision to turn their backs on the home where they had lived for decades and jump into a truck driven by a volunteer evacuation team. On Friday night, she and her elderly parents, shivering, hungry and a little lost, arrived at a school in Kharkiv that had been turned into a reception center for displaced people.
The only people left in Vovchansk “are the elderly and disabled, and they cannot move,” Ms. Novikova said.
“If a missile hits where they live, the streets will be full of dead bodies,” she added.
In recent days, life in her town has become difficult: there is no phone service, electricity, internet, and not much food. All supermarkets are closed, as is the outdoor market. Residents said even Ukrainian soldiers had left, although Ukrainian officials said the army was still defending Vovchansk, perhaps from the outskirts.
“There is no going back,” Ms. Novikova said. “The Russians are destroying everything. They are erasing the streets.”
While her family was holed up during a recent airstrike, she said a Russian bomb destroyed a nearby school. The blast wave was so large it shattered windows and shook houses several blocks away.
“And it was just a bombshell,” she said. “They are releasing dozens.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kharkiv, Marc Santora from Kiev, Ukraine, and Constant Meheut from Lviv, Ukraine.
