Firefighters work at a site of a Russian missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kharkiv, Ukraine on May 10, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Russian forces began a renewed ground assault in Ukraine’s northeast, killing and injuring several people and forcing more than 1,700 civilians to evacuate from the Kharkiv region, officials said on May 11.

Artillery, mortar, and aerial bombardments hit more than 30 different towns and villages, leaving at least three people dead and five others injured, said Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Syniehubov.

Ukraine rushed reinforcements to the Kharkiv region on May 10 to hold off a Russian attempt to breach local defenses, authorities said.

Ukrainian forces also launched a barrage of drones and missiles on May 11 night, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said, with air defense systems downing 21 rockets and 16 drones over Russia’s Belgorod, Kursk and Volgograd regions. One person died in a drone strike in the Belgorod region, and another in the Kursk region, local officials said.

Another strike set ablaze an oil depot in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Luhansk region, killing three people and injuring eight more, Leonid Pasechnik, the region’s Moscow-installed leader said on the messaging app Telegram on May 11.

Russian forces stepped up their bombardment of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in late March. May 10’s attack signaled a tactical switch in the war by Moscow that Ukrainian officials had been expecting for weeks.

Russian military bloggers said the assault could mark the start of a Russian attempt to carve out a “buffer zone” that President Vladimir Putin vowed to create earlier this year to halt frequent Ukrainian attacks on Belgorod and other Russian border regions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed on May 10 evening that Russian forces were expanding their operations. He also called on the country’s Western allies to ensure that promised deliveries of military aid would swiftly reach the front lines.

“It is critical that partners support our warriors and Ukrainian resilience with timely deliveries. Truly timely ones,” he said in a video statement on X. “A package that truly helps is the actual delivery of weapons to Ukraine, rather than just the announcement of a package.”

The Kremlin’s forces have repeatedly sought to exploit Ukraine’s shortages of ammunition and personnel as the flow of Western military aid to Kyiv has tapered off in recent months, with promised new support still yet to arrive.

Ukraine previously said it was aware that Russia was assembling thousands of troops along the northeastern border, close to the Kharkiv and Sumy regions. Intelligence officials also said they had expected an attack there though Russia’s most recent ground offensive had been focused on parts of eastern Ukraine farther south.

While Russia’s gains in the region have so far been limited, analysts at the U.S. think tank Institute of the Study of War described them Friday as “tactically significant.”

They said Russia had only “committed relatively limited manpower to their initial assaults” but that the offensive in Kharkiv “is meant to … (draw) Ukrainian manpower and materiel from other critical sectors of the front in eastern Ukraine.”

The Russian military could also try to cut key supply routes and try to blockade Kharkiv, home to roughly 1.1 million people and only about 30 km south of the border.

In the war’s early days, Russia made a botched attempt to quickly storm Kharkiv but retreated from its outskirts after about a month. In the fall of 2022, seven months later, Ukraine’s army pushed them out of Kharkiv. The bold counterattack helped persuade Western countries that Ukraine could defeat Russia on the battlefield and merited military support.

Kyiv, Ukraine:

Russian attacks on eastern and southern Ukraine killed at least three people on Wednesday, officials said, as Kyiv called for more Patriot air defence systems to battle a surge in missile strikes.

Moscow has escalated aerial attacks on Ukraine in the past few weeks, targeting key infrastructure — including power stations — in retaliation for fatal bombardments of Russia’s border regions.

In Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv, which has been reeling from power outages due to the strikes, officials said shelling killed at least one person and injured 16 others.

“Four children are among the wounded. Apartment buildings were damaged. The number of victims may increase,” the region’s governor Oleg Sinegubov said.

The governor of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, which is partially occupied by Russia, said one woman had been killed in a drone attack on the village of Mykhailivka.

“A 61-year-old local resident was fatally wounded in her own home,” the official, Oleksandr Prokudin, wrote on social media.

And in the southeastern city of Nikopol, officials said artillery fire killed a 55-year-old man, while a ballistic missile strike on the coastal territory of Mykolaiv left eight wounded.

The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched 13 Iranian-designed attack drones overnight and that 10 were downed over the Kharkiv region, the neighbouring Sumy region and near the capital Kyiv.

‘Little time’

During an online briefing on Wednesday, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called again for urgent deliveries of air defence systems he said were crucial in warding off the increase in attacks.

“The peculiarity of the current Russian attacks is the intensive use of ballistic missiles that can reach targets at extremely high speeds, leaving little time for people to take cover and causing significant destruction,” Kuleba said.

“Patriot and other similar systems are defensive by definition. They are designed to protect lives, not take them,” he said.

Ukraine has been forced onto the defensive in the past few months as it struggles with ammunition shortages and delays to a $60 billion aid package from Washington.

It has also been forced to concede ground to Russia on the eastern front, warning earlier this week of “difficult” battles around the eastern city of Chasіv Yar.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in the Sumy region on Wednesday, where he met with soldiers recovering from their injuries.

The army’s ground forces commander warned last week that Russia was building a group of over 100,000 soldiers in advance of what may be a major offensive this summer.

Russia meanwhile announced that its air defence systems had shot down 18 rockets near the border city of Belgorod, which has recently seen an increase in fatal Ukrainian attacks.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said two people were wounded during the barrage and later drone attack.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)