Ukraine is trying to determine if Russia’s ground attack in Kharkiv is opening a new war front — or meant to divert overstretched Ukrainian troops?
The assault began at dawn. Defenders rushed in reinforcements. Pitched fighting raged.
Ukraine and its allies sought Friday to discern whether Russian forces were opening a major new war front, more than two years after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its sovereign neighbor.
“There is a fierce battle,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters in the capital, Kyiv, hours after Russian troops launched an armored ground offensive in northeastern Ukraine, near the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.
Ukraine’s defense ministry said its forces had blunted an initial Russian attempt to break through Ukrainian lines outside the border town of Vovchansk, but that fighting of varying intensity continued in the area.
Military analysts said the attack came as no real surprise, but that it was not yet clear whether this was a feint to divert overstretched Ukrainian forces, or marked the start of a serious all-out assault.
“It’s potentially very dangerous,” said Marc Thys, a former Belgian deputy defense chief who is now a senior analyst at the Brussels-based Egmont Institute. “It’s also very difficult to analyze at this moment.”
Ukraine for months has been struggling on the battlefield, with the most aggressive Russian moves concentrated on a different sector of the long front lines. The eastern town of Chasiv Yar — more than 160 miles to the southeast of Friday’s fighting and a key bulwark against a Russian push deeper into the Donbas industrial region — has been menaced for weeks.
But Ukraine’s northeast is vulnerable as well. Ukraine said earlier this year Russia was massing troops on its side of the frontier, where they could be used to strike at Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Sumy provinces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow wants to create a buffer zone inside Ukraine, which the Kremlin depicts as a necessary defensive measure — a position Ukraine calls ludicrous since Russia started the war and could end it by pulling back its forces.
