- A Ukrainian commander has complained about the absence of promised defenses in Kharkiv, according to the BBC.
- Denys Yaroslavskyi called the lack of defense like the mines a “betrayal,” blaming corruption or negligence.
- Russia launched a new offensive on Kharkiv, with around 35,000 troops on the northern front.
The commander of a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit said defenses in Kharkiv were failing as Russia tried to push into the region, blaming corruption or negligence by officials.
“There was no first line of defense,” Denys Yaroslavskyi told the BBC, reporting from Vovchansk on Sunday. “We saw it. The Russians came in. They came in, without any minefields.”
Jonathan Beale, the outlet’s defense correspondent, wrote that Yaroslavskyi showed him drone footage showing Russian troops crossing Ukraine’s northeastern border without resistance.
Yaroslavskyi, who heads a special Ukrainian reconnaissance unit, told the BBC that at least some defenses promised by officials were missing in Kharkiv.
“Either it was an act of negligence or it was corruption. It was not a failure. It was a betrayal,” he said, according to the media outlet.
He and his men were about to be deployed to the front line in Vovchansk at the time of the BBC report.
The press service of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside of normal business hours by Business Insider.
Located on the northeastern border of Kharkiv, Vovchansk is one of the closest Ukrainian cities to Russia’s Belgorod region. Kharkiv saw months of heavy fighting early in the war, when Russian forces first seized it but were later pushed back by kyiv.
Now, Russia is trying to regain a foothold in the region through a new offensive, claiming this weekend to have captured several border villages.
Days earlier, Ukrainian military observers reported that between 30,000 and 35,000 Russian troops had gathered for the offensive.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, head of Ukraine’s armed forces, said on Sunday that the situation in Kharkiv had “significantly deteriorated.”
“Currently, fighting continues in the border areas along the border with the Russian Federation,” Syrskyi wrote in a message on Telegram.
It is not clear what the Kremlin’s objective is in the event of a new assault on Kharkiv. Russian leader Vladimir Putin suggested in March that Russia create a “buffer zone” there that would protect Belgorod from possible Ukrainian attacks, a comment that kyiv said was a sign that Moscow was preparing to attack in the north.
The Kremlin has since 2022 accused Ukraine of bombing Belgorod, although this also comes amid repeated reports that Russian troops missed or mistakenly dropped bombs on civilians.
Most recently, an apartment building in Belgorod partially collapsed on Sunday due to shelling, killing 13 people and injuring 20 others, according to local authorities. Russia blamed the deaths on fragments of Ukrainian missiles intercepted by air defense systems.
As for the fighting in Kharkiv, Vovchansk is believed to have been the focal point of the latest Russian attack, with conflicting reports Sunday over whether the settlement was seized.
Thousands of people have evacuated Vovchansk, which originally had a population of 20,000, now reduced to 3,000 since the start of the war, according to the BBC.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, estimates that Russia will need many more troops and equipment on the northern front if it is to capture the city of Kharkiv. -even.
He cites a March report by independent Russian news outlet Verstka, which cited a Kremlin source as saying that Russia would need some 300,000 additional troops, 10 times more than the estimated personnel already deployed in Kharkiv, to encircle and take the city.
The ISW believed that Russia’s ability to attack Vovchansk was largely due to the West preventing Ukraine from striking military targets with NATO-supplied equipment.
The United States recently approved about $25.7 billion in arms and munitions for Ukraine, including artillery shells that kyiv desperately needs to repel Russian advances.
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