‘They are erasing streets’: Russian attacks bring war nearer Kharkiv

KHARKIV, Ukraine — As fighting continued to flare along the Russia-Ukraine border Saturday, civilians fleeing for their lives stepped out of evacuation vans one by one, some on unsteady legs.

An older woman struggled with two large, confused dogs. A boy clutched his birth certificate, laminated and worn. An older couple grumbled at each other about who was going to lug their heavy bag. Another woman gingerly carried a wire cage holding a bright green parrot.

Even the bird inside, which provided the one drop of color in a grim tableau, seemed desperate to flee the shelling, said the woman, Natasha Radchenko. “He was shaking,” she said. “And hiding.”

After two long years, the war in Ukraine keeps finding new zones of misery. Over the past two days, several thousand civilians who had hung on through some very tough times finally abandoned their homes in Ukraine’s northeast after the Russians opened a new front.

Friday at dawn, Russian troops launched a complex attack with aircraft, artillery, infantry troops and armor, surging across the border near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. By all accounts — and by the shudders of enormous bombs hitting the ground not far from the evacuation point — the two sides are now locked in heavy fighting over a string of villages just a few miles inside Ukrainian territory.

Russian forces have been slowly but steadily chewing through Ukrainian defenses 150 miles south of Kharkiv, heading toward the small but strategically located old factory town of Chasiv Yar. Recent reports indicate that Russian troops have advanced close enough to a critical highway to nearly cut Ukrainian supply lines. The Russians have attacked the northern border area precisely to distract the Ukrainian forces in this area, Ukrainian military officials said, but they insisted that it wasn’t working.

The northern border villages where fighting now rages have been fought over before. The small town of Vovchansk has experienced the full war cycle — occupied by Russian troops after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, liberated that September and sporadically shelled since then.

Video footage widely circulated on Ukrainian media channels revealed the aftermath from the past two days of relentless bombardment: fires burning in Vovchansk’s streets, splintered trees, deserted, roofless homes and elegant, cream-colored buildings with giant holes punched through them, their walls turned into cascades of tumbling bricks.

This is the assaulted landscape that people are fleeing. At least three people have been killed. Until Friday afternoon, Tetiana Novikova had spent her entire 55 years in Vovchansk.

The only ones left in Vovchansk, Novikova said, “are the old and the disabled, and they can’t move.”

In recent days, life in her town had become untenable: no phone service, electricity, internet and not much food. All the supermarkets were closed, as was the outdoor market. Even Ukrainian soldiers had left, residents reported, although Ukrainian officials have said troops are still defending Vovchansk, perhaps from the outskirts.

“It’s impossible to go back,” Novikova said. “The Russians are destroying everything. They are erasing streets.”

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