Caught off guard by the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northeast of its neighbor that it invaded 200 days ago, Russia began retaliating with missiles and artillery against the areas it lost in the Kharkiv region.
In the province’s eponymous capital, which was not occupied by the Russians, residents face a blackout and lack of water. “The nightmare started again, we thought the worst was over,” Anna Rudavina, a journalist who works at a hotel chain in the city, said via text message.
She stayed April and May out of Kharkiv, but came back and resumed her life. “We never returned to normal, but today the explosions were within the urban perimeter,” said she, who lives in the west of the regional capital, an area considered safe because it is further away from Russian artillery range. “It was missiles,” she said.
According to the command of the Armed Forces in Kiev, 11 of them, by cruise, had reached the region between Sunday night (11) and this morning. Over the course of the day, more explosions were reported there, in Kupiansk and in Izium, a major railway hub that Moscow used to supply its troops further south-east, in occupied Donbass.
The city was recaptured by Ukraine on Saturday. The local city government says that 80% of Izium’s buildings were either destroyed or damaged, and that at least 1,000 people died as a result of the Russian occupation — the population was 50,000 before the war, and is now down to a fifth of that.
The Russian Defense Ministry admitted this Monday (12) to having withdrawn troops, but says it did so as a rearrangement of forces. It’s a sweetened way of explaining what the images circulating under Kiev’s supervision suggest: an escape, leaving behind weapons and provisions.
Side-by-side versions, the fact is that Russia only now, after losses over the past week, seems to really react. Reinforcements were sent on Friday (9), but this does not have an immediate effect.
Vladimir Putin’s government preferred not to blink. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said on Monday that the “special military operation will continue until it achieves its objectives.” The Defense Ministry says it attacked military and militia members of the Kraken group, killing 250 people.
Ukraine, meanwhile, says Sunday’s attacks are aimed at civilian infrastructure, which explains the blackout and lack of water in Kharkiv. “No military installations, the objective is to leave people without light and heat,” the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote on Twitter.
According to military analysts, the Russians are regrouping soldiers and equipment using the natural boundary of the Oskil River, east of Izium. From there, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has warned, there could be a counterattack, as Kiev’s forces say they have recaptured 3,000 square km of territory very quickly, exposing their meager number of tanks, which have been decisive so far.
This is the bet made by observers in Moscow: that the speed of advance would not be matched by an ability to hold on to gains. The next few days should clarify this.
The surprise attack by the Ukrainians to the northeast marks a new stage in the war that had begun with preparations for a counteroffensive in the south, in the Kherson region, which dragged on for a month before gaining traction. Kiev spent the weekend selling the version that the whole effort in the south was just a diversion to attract Russian forces and leave the northeast unguarded.
It makes sense, but it also hides the fact that at Kherson Ukrainian advances were modest. Strategically, maintaining occupation there is more important to Russians than in the Kharkiv region, as the province borders Crimea, being part of the bridge connecting the peninsula annexed in 2014 to the Donbass to the east.
On the other hand, Kharkiv is an important support line for Russian and pro-Russian forces in Donbass. For Kiev, the reconquest of the region is also vital because it at least pushes Moscow towards the Russian-speaking borders of the east, in the event of some future negotiation to end the war.
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