Russian forces have drawn closer to Kupiansk, in northeastern Ukraine, prompting stepped-up calls for civilians to flee and reflecting the hard choices both sides must make about where to send reinforcements along a front that stretches for hundreds of miles.
Kupiansk, a small city about 25 miles from the border with Russia, has been under regular Russian artillery bombardment for months, and a 45-year-old civilian was killed on Tuesday when the meat processing plant where he worked as a security guard was struck, officials said.
Russia’s military has put Kupiansk, already battered and mostly depopulated, in its cross hairs, hoping to prompt Ukraine to come to the city’s defense by siphoning soldiers away from its own counteroffensive in the south and southeast.
Ukrainian commanders, in turn, hope that the slow gains they are making in that counteroffensive will force the Russians to redeploy forces from Kupiansk to those battlefields.
Some Western officials have said that Ukraine should concentrate all the forces it can on the southern counteroffensive. But President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has dismissed the criticism, saying that Ukrainian forces would not be shifted away from defending places like Kupiansk.
Since June, Ukraine has been on the offensive, trying to drive a wedge southward into Russian-occupied territory, splitting and severing Moscow’s supply lines. One Ukrainian thrust is aimed at the city of Melitopol and another at the city of Berdiansk, both in the Zaporizhzhia region, but each has advanced only a few miles in the face of elaborate Russian defenses.
At the same time, the Ukrainians have made some gains to the west of those battles, in the Kherson region, and to the northeast, around Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, which the Russians have fully held since May.
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