The commander of a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit said defenses in Kharkiv have been lacking as Russia tries to push into the region, blaming corruption or negligence from officials.
“There was no first line of defense,” Denys Yaroslavskyi told the BBC, which reported from Vovchansk on Sunday. “We saw it. The Russians just walked in. They just walked in, without any mined fields.”
Jonathan Beale, a defense correspondent at the outlet, wrote that Yaroslavskyi showed him drone footage of Russian troops walking past Ukraine’s northeastern border without resistance.
Yaroslavskyi, who heads a Ukrainian Special 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 corruption. It wasn’t a failure. It was a betrayal,” he said, per the outlet.
He and his men were set to deploy to the front line in Vovchansk at the time of the BBC’s report.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine’s General Staff press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
Lying on Kharkiv’s northeastern border, Vovchansk is one of Ukraine’s closest cities to the Russian region of Belgorod. Kharkiv saw months of heavy fighting in the early stages of the war, when Russian forces initially seized it but were later rebuffed by Kyiv.
Now, Russia is trying to re-establish a foothold in the region through a new offensive, claiming this weekend to capture several border villages.
Days earlier, Ukrainian military observers reported that between 30,000 to 35,000 Russian troops had gathered for the push.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, said on Sunday that the situation in Kharkiv had “significantly worsened.”
“Currently, there are ongoing battles in the border areas along the state border with the Russian Federation,” Syrskyi wrote in a message on Telegram.
It’s unclear what’s the Kremlin’s intended goal for a renewed assault on Kharkiv. Russian leader Vladimir Putin in March suggested that Russia create a “buffer zone” there that would shield Belgorod from possible Ukrainian attacks, a comment that Kyiv said was a sign Moscow was preparing to attack in the north.
The Kremlin has since 2022 been accusing Ukraine of shelling Belgorod, though this also comes amid repeated reports of Russian troops misfiring or dropping bombs by mistake on civilians there.
Most recently, an apartment building in Belgorod partially collapsed on Sunday due to shelling, killing 13 and injuring 20, per local authorities. Russia blamed the deaths on fragments of Ukrainian missiles intercepted by air defense systems.
As for the fighting in Kharkiv, Vovchansk has reportedly been a focal point for the latest Russian attack, with conflicting reports on Sunday of whether the settlement has been seized.
Thousands of people have been evacuating Vovchansk, which originally had a population of 20,000 that’s dwindled to 3,000 since the war started, per The BBC.
The Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War has estimated that Russia will need far more troops and equipment on the northern front if it wants to seize Kharkiv city itself.
It cited a report in March by Russian independent outlet Verstka, which quoted a Kremlin source saying Russia will need some 300,000 more troops, or 10 times more than the estimated personnel already deployed in Kharkiv, to surround and take the city.
The ISW assessed that Russia’s ability to attack Vovchansk was largely due to the West restricting Ukraine from hitting military targets with NATO-supplied equipment.
The US more recently approved about $25.7 billion in weaponry and ammo for Ukraine, including artillery shells desperately needed by Kyiv to stave off Russian advances.
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