Ukrainian forces have “prevented” Russia from advancing further into the northeastern Kharkiv region and are now counterattacking, but Moscow is stepping up attacks on other parts of the front, the army said Friday Ukrainian.
kyiv has been facing a new Russian ground attack in the Kharkiv region since May 10, when thousands of Moscow troops stormed the border, making their biggest territorial advances in 18 months.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the regional capital on Friday to discuss the battle for Vovchansk, a town less than five kilometers from the border.
“Ukrainian defense forces stopped Russian troops in the Kharkiv sector… The situation is under control, counter-offensive actions are underway,” the army said.
Despite the initial successes, “the enemy completely got bogged down in street fighting for Vovchansk and suffered very high losses in its assault units,” Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky said on social media.
In an attempt to capture the city, Russia is “currently moving its reserves from different sectors to support active assault operations, but to no avail,” Syrsky added.
He warned, however, that the situation was turbulent on the Eastern Front, where Russia says its forces have made a series of advances over the past two weeks.
Fighting near the eastern towns of Chasiv Yar, Pokrovsk and Kurakhove was particularly “intense”, he said.
Russia announced Thursday that it had made incursions near the town of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine.
Three days earlier, it claimed to have seized the village of Bilogorivka, a key target for Moscow, which seeks to wrest control of the entire Luhansk region from kyiv.
Moscow says it launched the offensive in northeastern Ukraine to create a “buffer zone” along the border to prevent future Ukrainian counterattacks on its territory.
Railway strikes
As Ukraine rushed its troops to the northeast, kyiv again accused Moscow of deliberately targeting civilians in its strikes.
State-owned rail operator Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia) reported a series of attacks on the Kharkiv region’s rail system, which damaged tracks, wagons and buildings.
“The enemy continues to deliberately try to stop the railway in the Kharkiv region,” he said on Telegram.
The company shared photos showing smoke rising from a wrecked train car, twisted metal and debris along the tracks, and a depot with shattered windows.
Long-distance and suburban trains were running as planned, the national railway company said, despite repeated Russian strikes on the network, vital for both civilians and soldiers.
Strikes on the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, killed at least seven people on Thursday, local authorities said.
More than 11,000 people in the region have been evacuated since Russia launched its new offensive two weeks ago, according to local governor Oleh Synehubov.
Separately, Ukraine fired missiles overnight at the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, killing two “chance bystanders,” the region’s Russian-installed leader, Sergei Aksyonov, said.
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