The Ukrainian Army has launched several counter-offensives to try to recover the 30 kilometers of territory that separate this metropolis from the border with Russia.
Kharkov, the second largest city in Ukraine after kyiv, managed to avoid being taken by Russian troops, despite suffering heavy bombardment and seeing much of its buildings and infrastructure destroyed. But now the nightmare repeats itself. Missiles and bombs are falling again as the Russian Army moves ever closer with the apparent intention of besieging the city.
This is what the adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, Vadim Denisenko, believes in statements to national television. In his words, “Russia is trying to turn Kharkov into a front-line city.” Shortly after, the Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed that a tank repair factory in Kharkov had been attacked with missiles.
And it is that, from Kharkov, the Ukrainian Army has launched several counter-offensives to try to recover the 30 kilometers of territory that separate this metropolis from the border with Russia. The American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) says Ukrainian units are preparing to launch a counteroffensive west of Izium to cut off Russian lines of communication as they fight to defend Kharkiv further to the northwest.
The adviser to the Ukrainian Presidency, Oleksiy Arestovich, estimates that the Russian forces are also trying to move the Ukrainian artillery away from the Kharkov area so that they do not attack the railway through which they are supplied. Kharkov, which had just over 1.4 million inhabitants before the war, is almost entirely Russian-speaking. At the end of February it was close to falling into Russian hands, but its defenders managed to repel the offensive.
Meanwhile, in Severodonetsk, in the Lugansk region, high-intensity armed clashes continue to take place. According to the governor of the area, Sergei Gaidai, the Ukrainian soldiers have managed to “stop the assault around Toshkivka (…) the enemy withdrew,” he wrote on Facebook, denying that the Russians had completely taken over Severodonetsk. . “It is true that they control most of the city, but not completely,” he assured.
In an interview with the German newspaper Bild, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg affirms that the conflict in Ukraine could last “years”, but insists on the need “not to give up” and to continue supporting kyiv. In a column in The Times newspaper, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson thinks the same. In his opinion, “we must prepare for a prolonged war.”
Meanwhile, according to information from the Russian agency TASS, the heads of the Azov battalion, considered neo-Nazi by Moscow, have been transferred to Moscow for questioning and are in the Lefórtovo pre-trial detention prison.
After resisting for two and a half months in the Azovstal steelworks in Mariúpol, all the combatants of the Azov battalion surrendered in May thanks to an agreement mediated by the UN and the Red Cross, which provides for their exchange for Russian prisoners. However, the leader of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, Denís Pushilin, warns that many of them could be sentenced to death, a sentence that has already been handed down this month for three brigade members, two British and one Moroccan.
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