RUSSIAN TROOPS REGROUP AND DIG IN
Threat to Kharkiv remains despite soldiers’ withdrawal
PRUDYANKA, Ukraine
Ukrainian troops sat on a bench under the trees cracking jokes. One hopped on a bicycle and cycled off down the empty road. This was the safest part of Prudyanka, a village north of the city of Kharkiv, their commander said with a cheerful laugh.
Ukrainian soldiers are in good spirits in this northeastern region of Ukraine. They were part of a Ukrainian counterattack force that successfully pushed Russian troops back from Kharkiv two weeks ago, putting an end to months of shelling of the city, Ukraine’s second largest.
In the ensuing euphoria over dealing that setback to the Russian forces, there was talk of Ukrainian troops marching on to the Russian border only 25 miles away. But that seems to have been premature, with some Russian troops north of Kharkiv holding on and digging in, becoming much harder to drive back.
Although the Russians did withdraw from the immediate outskirts of Kharkiv, they are still close enough to shell the city, and heavy fighting continues within earshot of a ring of villages to the east that they recently abandoned, Ukrainian troops and villagers said in interviews.
In recent days, both armies have traded artillery fire across the tree-lined hills that roll away north and east of the city. On Thursday, black smoke rose on the horizon over several locations in Russian-held territory.
Not surprisingly, the Ukrainian forces remain confident they will rout the Russians eventually.
“They will lose their ability to fight the war,” said Vitaliy Chorny, a member of a volunteer brigade who works as a forward spotter, flying drones to identify targets for Ukrainian artillery units. “Our guys are not feeling tired and they are the opposite.” But the Ukrainians also say they are encountering tough resistance from Russian units that have constructed extensive defensive positions.
“There is a whole underground city there,” one officer said, gesturing further north. He gave only his code name, Tikhi, and his age, 31, according to military protocol.
“They have trenches, bunkers, everything is operating underground. We tried one time to take it. It was quite scary.”
The city of Kharkiv is springing back to life, with 2,000 people returning daily by train.
“We consider that we have been successful and they lost, in fact,” said Oleh Synyehubov, governor of Kharkiv. He gave an interview in the street under the trees as his office on Kharkiv’s central square was gutted by direct hits from two cruise missiles in March.
Yet a tour through the villages north and east of the city revealed a more precarious situation.
As they retreated, the Russians abandoned dozens of their own dead, amid burned-out tanks and armor and smashed trenches across the rolling hills. Few people have returned to the battered areas. A dead Russian soldier still lay on the grounds of a burned-out school in Vilkhivka, his chest bare, his body swollen and blackened.
A villager, Nikolai, 62, was pushing a damaged cart he said he had used to carry the body of a local person to the graveyard. Almost too distraught to speak, he began to weep. “Nobody thought it would be so,” he said, wiping his eyes. “All the houses around me burned.”
The Russian forces, stalled around Kharkiv since the early weeks of the invasion, were reinforced with troops withdrawn from Kyiv after the Russian drive there was defeated, Chorny said.
“They were well-prepared, serious soldiers,” he said of the Russians. “They had brand-new tanks and good equipment, which is proof that they thought the area was strategically important.”
Ukrainian forces, also freed up from Kyiv, piled into the region at the same time. Chorny was part of a group that harried the Russians as they withdrew from towns and villages east of Kyiv before taking part in the counterattack in Kharkiv.
But as that drive was pushing ahead — and just after his unit had suffered a painful battlefield reversal — the Russians abandoned their positions.
Exactly why they retreated became clear, he said, when he went back to survey the battlefield last week and was stunned by the extent of the destruction to the Russian positions wrought by Ukrainian artillery. “I cannot even believe how hard it was for them,” he said. “It was impossible for them to hold.”
Fighting is still heavy in the Kharkiv region.
A 49-year-old businessman who enlisted at the beginning of the war and goes by the code name of Odin was nursing wounds to his face from a mine blast just north of Kharkiv in an area recently vacated by the Russians. One of his soldiers lost a leg in the blast, he said.
The first forces that came into Ukraine in February and March were mostly ill-prepared and inexperienced, Odin said. But the units now being deployed are better trained and more experienced.
“It is getting much more difficult,” he said. “They are digging in, and now we are facing a competent army.”