Russian retreat seen near Kharkiv, despite Victory Day push for gains
Russia’s push to give its president a showcase victory in Ukraine appeared to face a new setback on Saturday, as Ukrainian defenders chased the invaders back towards the northeast border and away from the city of Kharkiv, with the Russians blowing up bridges behind them.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin leading his country in Victory Day celebrations commemorating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, the apparent Russian pullback from the area around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, contradicted the Russian narrative and illustrated the complicated picture along the 300mile front in eastern Ukraine.
The Russians have been trying to advance in eastern Ukraine for the past few weeks and have been pushing especially hard as Victory Day approaches, but Ukrainian forces — armed with new weapons supplied by the United States and other Western nations — have been pushing back in a counteroffensive.
The destruction of three bridges by Russian forces, about 12 miles northeast of Kharkiv, reported by the Ukrainian military, suggested that the Russians not only were trying to prevent the Ukrainians from pursuing them but also had no immediate plans to return.
The Russian actions were similar to what the Russian military had done last month in a retreat from the city of Chernihiv, north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, said Frederick Kagan, a military historian and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based public policy research group. The strategy near Kharkiv was an indicator, he said, that “the order to retreat to somewhere had been given and they were trying to set up a defensive line.”
Ukrainian forces have retaken a constellation of towns and villages in the outskirts of Kharkiv this past week, putting them in position to unseat Russian forces from the region and reclaim total control of the city “in a matter of days,” according to recent analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group.
“The Russian occupiers continue to destroy the civilian infrastructure of the Kharkiv region,” the region’s governor, Oleh Sinegubov, said in a Telegram post on Saturday, adding that shelling and artillery attacks overnight had targeted several districts, destroying a national museum in the village of Skovorodynivka.
For Russia, perhaps the best example of anything resembling a victory was the long-besieged southeastern port city of Mariupol. Although much of the city has been destroyed by Russian bombardments, there were growing indications on Saturday that Russia’s control of the city was nearly complete.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s intelligence directorate said in a statement that Russian officers were being moved from combat positions and sent to protect a Russian military parade being planned in Mariupol.
Petro Andrushchenko, an adviser to the city council, posted a series of photos to Telegram on Friday that appeared to show how Russian forces were restoring “monuments of the Soviet period” across the city.
One image appeared to show a Russian flag flying above an intensive care hospital. Another image, posted last week, showed municipal workers replacing Ukrainian road signs with signs in Russian script. The images could not be verified.
On Friday, 50 people were evacuated from the city’s Azovstal steel plant, the final holdout of Ukrainian forces and a group of civilians. Evacuations under the auspices of the United Nations and Red Cross resumed on Saturday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an overnight address that diplomatic efforts were still under way to ensure that both the civilians and the remaining military personnel hunkered inside the steel plant could be brought to safety.
The goal of Russian forces — for now at least — appears to be seizing as much of the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas as possible, by expelling Ukrainian forces that have been fighting Russian-backed separatists for years in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Since Russia’s attack began on February 24, about 80 per cent of those two provinces have fallen under the Kremlin’s control.
Russian forces are trying to break through Ukrainian lines and encircle troops defending the area around the eastern city of Severodonetsk but are being held in check, the regional governor, Serhiy Haidai said.
“It is a war, so anything can happen, but for now, the situation is difficult but under control,” Haidai said in a telephone interview. “They have broken through in some places and these areas are being reinforced.”
The Russians seemed “unlikely to successfully surround the town,” according to the latest update from the Institute for the Study of War.
THE GOAL OF RUSSIAN FORCES APPEARS TO BE SEIZING AS MUCH OF THE EASTERN UKRAINIAN REGION KNOWN AS THE DONBAS AS POSSIBLE, BY EXPELLING UKRAINIAN FORCES