Ukrainian troops launch counter-offensive near Kharkiv
Ukraine has launched a surprise counter-offensive in the northeast of the country in an effort to retake occupied territory close to its border with Russia.
There is fighting around Balakliya, a Russian-held town close to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Kharkiv, which is just 25 miles from Russia, remains under Ukrainian control but has been targeted almost daily by missile attacks.
Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukraininian presidential adviser, promised “great news” from the Kharkiv region. Social media video appeared to show Ukrainian troops riding on an armoured personnel carrier through Balakliya, a town of about 27,000 people that is an important hub for Russia’s military.
Pro-Moscow military analysts said that Russia had only left the Rosgvardia national guard to hold its lines around Kharkiv after moving army troops southwards to try and hold off a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Kherson region. The Kremlin’s move to reinforce its positions there has left it exposed elsewhere, western analysts say.
“The enemy has come alive along the entire Kharkiv front. It seems comrades that they have f***ed us hard,” Anatoly Dremov, a Russian solider, posted on social media. He also lashed out at Russia’s generals for failing to spot the Ukrainian advance. “How blind must they be not to see such obvious things? Leaving the national guard face to face with the Ukrainian armed forces is a complete failure.”
As discontent grew among President Putin’s supporters, Zakhar Prilepin, a Russian nationalist politician, compared the apparent tactical failure to disastrous Russian military operations in Chechnya in the 1990s. “Quarter of a century has passed and I thought things would be a bit different,” he wrote on Telegram.
The British Ministry of Defence said today that “heavy fighting” was taking place in the Kharkiv, Kherson and Donbas regions. “Multiple concurrent threats spread across 500km will test Russia’s ability to co-ordinate operational design and reallocate resources across multiple groupings of forces,” it said. “Earlier in the war, Russia’s failure to do this was one of the underlying reasons for the military’s poor performance.”
The fighting came as a Moscow-installed official in occupied southern Ukraine was targeted in a car bombing. Artyom Bardin, the pro-Kremlin head of Berdyansk on the Black Sea, was in a “grave” condition after his car exploded. He is the latest in a number of pro-Moscow officials who have been killed or injured in attacks by partisan fighters in occupied regions of southern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s advance in the Kharkiv region came as Putin indicated that an end to the conflict was unlikely any time soon. Speaking at an economic forum in Vladivostok, in Russia’s far east, he insisted that Moscow was defending residents of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine from nationalists. “This is our duty and we will fulfil it,” he said.
