Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka Associated Press A Ukrainian soldier named Manul, from the Achiles Battalion of the 92nd Brigade, brings an explosive drone that will fly over Russian positions to its takeoff point, in the Karkiv region.
France Media Agency to kyiv
Published at 11:30 a.m. Updated at 6:38 p.m.
- Europe
Ukraine assured Friday that it had “stopped” the Russian assault on the Kharkiv region, underway for two weeks, and that it had begun a counterattack in this sector of the northeast of its territory where the president visited Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Russian army launched an offensive in the Kharkiv region from the border on May 10, seizing several localities and forcing the Ukraine to deploy valuable reinforcements in the area.
After two weeks of fighting, “Ukrainian defense forces have stopped Russian troops” and are “carrying out actions against offensives,” Colonel Igor Prokhorenko, an official with the Ukrainian army general staff, said Friday.
He described the situation as “difficult”, but “stable and under control” in this region where clashes are taking place in particular for control of the city of Vovtchansk, cut in two and where kyiv has accused Russian forces of abuses.
Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka Associated Press Buildings near Kharkiv were destroyed after a Russian missile hit them last Sunday. Several people died in this attack.
“The enemy is completely bogged down in street fighting in Vovchansk and has suffered very significant losses,” General Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, assured Friday, asserting that Moscow was sending “reserves” to continue its assault.
According to kyiv, Russia is seeking to extend to breaking point the defensive lines of the Ukrainian forces, weakened by two years of war, the lack of new recruits and shortages of weapons due to months of Western prevarication.
President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he would be in Kharkiv on Friday for meetings on the “defense of the region”.
“Our soldiers were able to regain the initiative in the fighting in the border area where the Russian occupiers entered,” he assured in the evening.
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Multiple Russian assaults
As for other sectors of the front, General Syrsky's tone was more somber.
Further south in the Kharkiv region, the Russians have been on the attack near Koupiansk for almost a year. And now “the situation is complicated in the Kyslivka sector, where the enemy is trying to break through our defenses and reach the Oskil”, a river.
In Donbass (east), the officer reported fierce clashes in the areas of Chassiv Iar, Pokrovsk and Kurakhové, where the Russians have been nibbling ground for months.
Finally, “the most intense and violent fighting is taking place in the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove sectors. The enemy is trying to break through the defense of our troops on a narrow section of the front between Staromykhailivka and Berdychi,” he said.
Russia claims that its May offensive in northeastern Ukraine aims to create a buffer zone supposed to prevent Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory.
Russian advances near Tchasiv Yar seem to be multiplying.
Moscow has notably claimed the capture of two villages on the outskirts that Ukraine had liberated last summer.
The Kremlin is trying to take advantage of the fact that the opposing army has been weakened by losses and months of paralysis in American military aid.
< p>Russia, which has put its arms industry in order, declared on Friday that it was preparing a visit by President Vladimir Putin to North Korea, a country already suspected of supplying thousands of tonnes shells and other munitions to Russia.
The United States, for its part, announced on Friday the sending of a new tranche of $275 million in arms to “help Ukraine repel Russia’s offensive near Kharkiv.”
“A wall of drones”
But Ukraine still lacks anti-aircraft defenses and demands that the Europeans and Americans finally authorize it to use the weapons provided to strike the army's rear bases in Russian territory, something that the West has so far refused, for fear of an escalation.
President Zelensky therefore increases his interventions, pressing Ukraine's allies to provide him with anti-missile systems and to allow him to strike military targets in Russia with Western munitions.
In the meantime, Russian forces continue to bombard Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city. Around fifteen missiles hit it on Thursday, causing the death of seven civilians.
New bombings during the night from Thursday to Friday damaged vital regional railway infrastructure for the economy and travel in a country deprived of air links in particular for more than two years.
For its part, Ukraine continues to strike the occupied zones, Russian regions and Crimea, annexed in 2014. The Russian governor of this peninsula, Sergei Aksionov, said that two civilians had died in the Simferopol district, in the center of this peninsula.
The six NATO member countries sharing a land border with Russia have also agreed to erect a “wall of drones stretching from Norway to Poland”, aimed at protecting themselves with advanced technologies against ” provocations from hostile countries,” Lithuanian Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite announced to the BNS news agency.
NATO said on the same day “solidarity” with Estonia after a border incident – the unilateral withdrawal of boundary buoys – which pitted it against Russia on the Narva River separating the two countries.