Russia is trying to take advantage of the lag time between the arrival of the $61 billion in U.S. aid and the distribution of it as Moscow has launched an offensive into Northeastern Ukraine that may be the start of an attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city.
Ukraine wrested Kharkiv from the Russians in the first months of its first counteroffensive of the war. It was a huge morale boost at the time. But those days are long gone. On Friday, the Russians had no trouble breaking Ukraine's first line of defense at the border.
“The Russians just walked in. They just walked in, without any mined fields," said Denys Yaroslavskyi, a Ukrainian reconnaissance commander. He told the BBC on Sunday, “There was no first line of defense."
Ukraine recently changed its draft law to boost troop numbers. But those troops won't be ready for combat for weeks. Training up the recruits to use NATO's sophisticated weaponry will take even more time.
In short, Russia hit the border at its weakest point and with exquisite timing.
Despite the disparity between the two forces, it’s not yet clear that Russia has committed sufficient troops for a successful assault on Kharkiv city. “The operation could set conditions for a major offensive operation that seeks to seize Kharkiv City, though Russian forces’ current limited efforts do not suggest that Russian forces are immediately pursuing a large-scale sweeping offensive operation to envelop, encircle, or seize Kharkiv City,” George Barros—the Geospatial Intelligence Team Lead at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington a think tank that tracks Russian troop movements—wrote yesterday. Russian forces ramped up their strikes Monday along the border in Sumy—a neighboring oblast northwest of Kharkiv—where it’s possible Russia could lengthen its northern border offensive.
Russia seems to be forcing Ukraine to redeploy forces from the south to arrest Russian advances in the northeast. “The enemy is trying to deliberately stretch it [the front line], attacking in small groups, but in new directions, so to speak,” Oleh Syniehubov, the governor of Kharkiv oblast, said on Monday. Zelensky noted yesterday, “We understand the enemy’s actions and their plan to divert our forces.”
“There’s no doubt there’s been a cost in the months-long delay in getting the supplementary budget request approved and the equipment sent out to Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday. “We’re doing everything we can to rush this assistance out there.”
Blinken arrived in Ukraine on Tuesday and had a series of meetings with Ukrainian officials including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Zelensky will urge Blinken to provide more military support to the Ukrainian military, including additional air defense support. “We want to get it as soon as possible, and the second point is air defense, the biggest deficit for us. I think the biggest problem is that we really need today two patriots for the Kharkiv region, because there are people – they are under attack, civilians, warriors, everybody – they are under Russian missiles,” he told reporters.
During his fourth visit to Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion, Blinken was also scheduled to meet Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba as well as with civil society and private sector partners.
They will “discuss battlefield updates, the impact of new US security and economic assistance, long-term security and other commitments, and ongoing work to bolster Ukraine’s economic recovery,” according to a State Department statement.
It's not certain whether this Russian thrust into Northeastern Ukraine is the beginning of a summer offensive that will attempt to retake the strategic stronghold.
Given the symbolic importance of holding on to Kharkiv, it's likely that Ukraine will throw everything it has into that fight.
