Russia opens new front in Ukraine war. Is Ukraine losing the war with Russia?
A new Russian offensive has clawed back miles of terrain near the key Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, but a surge of U.S. weapons and Russia’s inability to coordinate its ground and air forces make a breakthrough unlikely, according to U.S. officials and military analysts.
Ukrainians remain under threat from Russian drones, missiles and shelling as fighting picks up along a 700-mile front. Ukrainian troops, backed by billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons, are expected to limit Russian gains. But Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, southeast of Kyiv, could face more bombing as Russian artillery draws near.
The view that Russia’s gains remain incremental in the grinding, two-year war of attrition is based on interviews with U.S. and Ukrainian officials, intelligence assessments and military experts.
"The Ukrainians are not in danger of losing, but they’re not winning right now," said Seth Jones, director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "There are no peace talks, and no interest in them from the Ukrainians. Russia feels it has the initiative."
The intensified fighting comes as Ukraine has been outgunned, running low on ammunition and waiting for a new $60 billion package of U.S. military aid to take effect.
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Russia seeks a Ukraine buffer zone
Since last week, Russia has advanced about 2 to 5 miles in Ukraine's northeast, mostly over open terrain. It has yet to hit Ukraine's first line of defense, according to a U.S. official. The concern, according to the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, is that the Russian advance could put Kharkiv in range of Russian artillery. In fact, U.S. officials believe Russia is seeking to establish a buffer zone in northeastern Ukraine to prevent cross-border attacks that have targeted Russian cities near the border.
While a breakthrough by Russian forces does not appear likely, Ukrainian morale and manpower have become an issue after months of nonstop fighting, few reinforcements and dwindling supplies of ammunition, the official said. Congress’ delay in providing the $60 billion military aid package has weakened Ukrainian defenses by depleting air defenses needed to stop Russian missile and glide-bomb attacks, the official said.
'It's hard, but they're holding on': On the ground in Ukraine, the war depends on U.S. weapons
Ammunition is now arriving at the frontlines in Ukraine after the recently approval aid package, the official said. Ukraine has also moved to make more young people eligible to serve, which could provide relief, the official said.
Still, Mykola Bielieskov, a military research fellow at Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies, said in a WhatsApp message that it was "very difficult to answer" the question of when the new U.S. military aid for Ukraine would make a difference.
In a separate blog post for the Atlantic Council think tank, Bielieskov also wrote last week that while "the renewed presence of Russian troops in northern Ukraine marks a significant escalation in the war," Russia’s "immediate military goals look to be rather limited." Bielieskov said that because Russia has concentrated up to 35,000 soldiers on its side of the border, this could change. But he told USA TODAY that any suggestions Russia was close to capturing Kharkiv or on the verge of a military breakthrough went "way too far."
Phillips P. O'Brien, a professor of strategic security studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, agreed with that assessment. He said that, as of Thursday, after Ukraine's military sent reinforcements to the area, Russian forces have stopped advancing in northeastern Ukraine.
"Let’s see if they can take Vovchansk, a small town, first," O'Brien said.
Synchronizing troops, tanks and warplanes
Russia’s struggles to synchronize troops and tanks with warplanes overhead limits its ability to break through Ukraine’s defense, Jones said. Ukraine's air defense has prevented Russia's air force from providing the cover its ground forces need for major advances.
Neither Ukraine's military nor its military intelligence agency returned a request for comment on whether Russia's activity near Kharkiv represented a major change in the war's trajectory.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, published a series of maps on Wednesday based on open-source information showing that Russian forces have seized territory in recent days in at least four towns in northeastern Ukraine: Hlyboke, Neskuchne, Starytsya and Vovchansk.
"The tempo of Russian offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast continues to decrease after Russian forces initially seized areas that Ukrainian officials have now confirmed were less defended," the think tank said in comments accompanying the maps.
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Squandered opportunity for landmines
One Ukrainian soldier involved in reconnaissance missions in the Kharkiv region said he expected the Russians to mount a larger offensive push there, and in Ukraine's neighboring Sumy region, in the coming days.
However, he did not think there was an imminent danger of the city of Kharkiv falling into Russian hands. He said some of the towns currently being contested northeast of Kharkiv suffered from a lack of defensive preparations.
For example, he believed Ukraine squandered an opportunity over the past few months to place landmines and other defensive weapons around Vovchansk and other towns near Kharkiv that could have slowed its enemy's advance. The soldier requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The soldier also expressed frustration over U.S. military aid.
He said that since the outbreak of the war more than two years ago, the Americans had provided Ukraine with sufficient weapons to keep them alive and fight back against the Russians − but not enough to help them win the war. The soldier said he had seen no fresh evidence that this has changed, even with the last round of U.S. aid.
Russia's small gains have come at a huge cost.
Each day, nearly 900 Russian troops are killed or wounded in action, according to an estimate released May 4 by British Defense Intelligence. Since Russia launched its illegal invasion in February 2022, more than 465,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded, British Intelligence estimates.
The Russian casualty rate is expected to increase over the summer as it presses its offensive. It could surpass 500,000 dead and injured by summer, Jones said.
So far, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been able to squelch domestic resistance by sending troops from Siberia, Central Asia and prison inmates, Jones said. The sons of elites from Moscow and St. Petersburg have thus far been spared.
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Ukraine ups pressure on US to allow strikes in Russia: ‘This is insane’
Ukraine’s struggle to fend off Russia’s massive offensive in the Kharkiv region has underscored a pressing issue that Kyiv has long tried to overturn: a ban on firing U.S. weapons to hit inside of Russia.
Russia launched its Kharkiv offensive from the neighboring Belgorod region, and some Ukrainian officials are arguing that the attack could have been blunted if they were allowed to hit targets in that Russian province.
A delegation of five Ukrainian members of parliament traveled to Washington this week to meet with Biden administration officials and congressional lawmakers in a bid to push the U.S. to reverse the ban.
But during a media roundtable event in Washington, the Ukrainian lawmakers expressed palpable frustration that the U.S. is still against the policy.
“It’s like if somebody were to attack Washington, D.C., from the Virginia state, and you say we’re not going to hit Virginia for some reason,” said David Arahamiya, head of a Ukrainian parliamentary group on U.S. relations and the lawmaker who led the delegation this week.
“It’s crazy. Military people, like generals, they don’t understand. So they are pushing us as politicians, like stop [the policy] this is insane.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during a trip to Kyiv this week, said the U.S. was committed to ensuring Ukraine can win the war against Russia but stressed Kyiv should focus on taking back Ukrainian territory.
“Ukraine has to make decisions for itself about how it’s going to conduct this war, a war it’s conducting in defense of its freedom, of its sovereignty, of its territorial integrity,” Blinken said at a press conference. “We’ve been clear about our own policy.”
Ukraine’s lobbying to get the U.S. to lift the ban comes as Russia has advanced in the northeastern Kharkiv region and is pressuring Ukrainian forces across the 600-mile eastern front.
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Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a Senate Armed Services Committee member, noted Kyiv is struggling after the U.S. delayed for months before passing a national security supplemental that includes $61 billion to support Ukraine.
But “we have to constantly weigh what we provide, what we allow them to use weapons for, with our desire to make sure that this doesn’t result in a conflict that spreads beyond Ukraine,” he told The Hill.
Speaking on the Russian momentum, Kelly added that Ukraine was rightly trying to “come up with some options on how you turn this thing around.”
Ukraine has long argued its ability to attack legitimate military targets in Russia is vital for its own defense.
In lieu of a policy change, Ukraine has resorted to hitting inside of Russia with its own weapons, including cheap drones that have harassed Russian targets such as oil refineries. The campaign to hit oil refineries with drones has picked up in pace and breadth in recent months.
But Ukrainian officials say there is no substitute for American-made arms such as the missile launcher weapon High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) or valued long-range artillery like the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS).
Maksym Skrypchenko, president of the Ukrainian think tank Transatlantic Dialogue Center, which advises Kyiv, said Russia has moved its command centers inside its own borders, and out of the range of HIMARS.
“And they feel totally safe,” he said in an email. “Imagine how weird this situation is: whenever something goes wrong, Russians can always retreat to their territory, regroup, and start again—Ukraine can’t hit them with effective weapons like ATACMS.”
Skrypchenko said if the ban had been lifted before the Kharkiv offensive, it could have prevented Russia from amassing troops at the border.
“Using weapons like Stingers inside Russia would also help push back Russian frontline bombers dropping guided bombs on frontline cities and Ukrainian defense positions,” he said. “Together with F-16s, it could be a game-changer to stop Russia from advancing in many places.”
Ukrainian member of parliament Oleksandra Ustinova, deputy head of the parliamentary group on relations with the U.S., warned that Kharkiv could become the next Mariupol, the southeastern Ukrainian city that was destroyed in the early days of the war.
“If we do not have permission to shoot Russian weapons sitting at the border right now, we have a huge possibility to lose large cities and the region because they [Russia] know about this restriction,” she said at the roundtable in Washington this week.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) argued in an analysis published earlier this week that the U.S. policy “makes no sense” and is “severely compromising Ukraine’s ability to defend itself” against the Kharkiv offensive.
The U.S. policy is preventing Ukraine from hitting back against the threat from precision-guided glide bombs, which Ukrainian forces have struggled to defeat, wrote George Barros, the Russia team and geospatial intelligence lead for the Russia-Ukraine war at the ISW.
Barros said Russia is leveraging its airspace as a “sanctuary” and that Ukraine cannot effectively defend against glide bomb threats without intercepting Russian aircraft in Russian airspace.
“Neither Russia nor any other state has the right to view its sovereign territory as inviolable in a war of aggression that it has initiated,” he wrote. “Establishing the principle that nuclear-armed states can earn such inviolability through threats of escalation encourages other such potential predators to imagine that they, too, can attack with impunity and demand sanctuary in their own territory.”
Western allies of Ukraine have long feared escalating the war between Ukraine and Russia, particularly as Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons.
But Skrypchenko, from the Transatlantic Dialogue Center, said Ukraine has repeatedly hit inside of Russia with its own weapons and worked with Russian volunteers to strike targets in the country — all without nuclear escalation.
“So maybe it’s high time we stopped drawing our own red lines and keep letting Russia know about them,” he said. “It’s an existential war for the survival of the Ukrainian people, not just a conflict where parties try to hit several strategic objectives in each other’s territory.”
But with Russia making critical advances across the eastern front, there have been growing calls to do more, including French President Emmanuel Macron floating the idea of sending NATO troops into Ukraine.
U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron signaled during a trip to Kyiv earlier this month that London would not stand in the way of Ukraine using British weapons to strike inside of Russia.
In an interview with Reuters, Cameron said “Ukraine has that right.”
“Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself,” he said.
But the U.S. has remained firm on sticking to the policy. Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said the U.S. often relays that message to Ukrainian officials.
“We believe that the equipment, the capabilities that we are giving Ukraine, that other countries are giving to Ukraine, should be used to take back Ukrainian sovereign territory,” she said. “The weapons that are provided, again, are for use on the battlefield.”
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John Herbst, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former ambassador to Ukraine, said the U.S. policy undermines its own objective of making sure Russia does not win the war.
“This is against the geopolitical interests of the United States, and from a humanitarian point of view, it is inexcusable,” he said.
“We crossed numerous, numerous alleged Kremlin red lines without seeing a mushroom cloud. And of course the [British] have told the Ukrainians you can use our weapons wherever you send them … so the red line has already been partly crossed.”
On Capitol Hill, some Republicans want to see Ukraine employ the U.S. weapons as they see fit.
“They should use the weapons to win the war, “said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), also on the committee, said he does “not have a problem with it.”
“If they were actually attacking and destroying civilian targets, it may be a different story,” he said. “But in this particular case, it seems to me that there is no escalation in this. The escalation has already occurred on the part of the Russian army.”
But Democrats are more hesitant to question Biden’s policy.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) said she had questions about what weapons Ukraine wants to use and how exactly they would be employed, while calling for assurances first on how other U.S. arms were used like cluster munitions.
“Right now,” she said, ”the restrictions should remain in place.”
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Ukraine fears new Russian offensive is only ‘the first wave’
Ukraine is just about holding the line, for now.
But President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Russia's new offensive in the northeast — which saw the Kremlin's troops sweep across the border and capture miles of territory before being halted by Kyiv's army — could be just the first of many.
Russia’s summer assault "could consist of several waves," Zelenskyy said Friday in an interview with the AFP news agency, adding: "There was the first wave" in the Kharkiv region.
It's just the latest suggestion by a Ukrainian official that Moscow's military might be planning to open new fronts across the front lines while Kyiv waits for U.S. military aid and new conscripts to boost its depleted forces. Zelenskyy also renewed criticism of his Western backers, saying they had left his country in a "nonsense situation" where it gets enough support to avoid total defeat, but not enough to achieve victory.
"They are helping Ukraine to keep going but not to win the war," Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told NBC News. "And they don’t seem to actually want to give Ukraine what it needs to win the war."
Russia launched a new offensive a week ago in a bid to exploit Ukraine's issues before new support arrives, raising fears that even the country’s second-largest city could fall into Moscow’s hands.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday his goal was to carve out a buffer zone around Russia's own under-fire border regions, rather than to seize Kharkiv itself.
“There are no such plans today,” he said after wrapping up his visit to China.
Zelenskyy has downplayed Russia’s gains, but he warned that Moscow was still the one advancing.
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“I won’t say it’s a great success [for Russia] but we have to be sober and understand that they are going deeper into our territory,” he told AFP, “not vice versa.”
Kyiv is also desperate to replenish its own military, but analysts say that Ukraine is losing troops faster than it can replenish them and the new efforts might be too late, even if Ukraine were to get the weapons it has been asking for.
On Friday, Zelenskyy signed into law a new bill that will allow some convicts to be drafted into the military in exchange for being released on parole. And a new mobilization law comes into effect Saturday.
“No matter how many thousands of rounds of artillery you got, you can’t have a soldier in two places at once,” said Frank Ledwidge, a former British military intelligence officer and a senior lecturer in war studies at England’s University of Portsmouth.
"An army is a really complex system of systems which interlock and takes years to build huge resources," he said. "You don't just conjure them up."
Zelenskyy acknowledged issues with manpower and “morale,” but said for now his troops had stabilized the front lines and that Russian forces had advanced no more than 6 miles into Ukrainian territory. Fierce fighting is ongoing in the streets of Vovchansk, a front-line town from which thousands of residents have fled in recent days.
Ukraine rushed reserves to the area, a move that helped prevent further losses in the northeast. But it could spread its forces even thinner on the battlefield and expose other parts of the front lines as the Russians push in the eastern Donetsk region and reportedly mass forces near Sumy, west of Vovchansk.
The Russian military said it had dealt Ukraine another setback in the area Saturday by taking control of Starytsya, a village to the west of Vovchansk.
The Ukrainians did not comment on the claim, though Kyiv's general staff said in an update that "the enemy does not stop trying to break through the defense of the Ukrainian troops" in the area. "Our defenders are trying to push back the enemy," it said.
NBC News could not independently verify the battlefield reports from either side.
While the Kremlin’s forces may not be sufficient to take Kharkiv, Ledwidge said, “they’re sufficient to probe Ukrainian forces and expose the lack of their defenses,” and the fall of Starytsya is another example.
Zelenskyy has blamed the lack of air defenses for the breach around Kharkiv, on Friday repeating his plea for more defense systems and fighter jets.
“In many ways, the most successful Russian campaign of the last few months hasn’t been on the ground,” O’Brien said. “It’s been the missile campaign against Ukrainian power, and that’s a huge problem.”
Ukraine is waiting for the $60 billion in U.S. military aid that was approved last month, which includes rocket launch systems, artillery rounds, infantry vehicles and other military equipment.
While his allies are calling for a swift end to the war, Zelenskyy says Ukraine will only accept a “fair” peace solution.
“We are in a nonsense situation where the West is afraid that Russia will lose the war,” he said. “And it does not want Ukraine to lose it.”
Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to forge deeper ties this week as their countries increasingly clash with the West, and Zelenskyy wants to use Beijing's "influence" with Moscow to his advantage.
He urged China to attend a summit next month in neutral Switzerland, while Russia has not been invited.
China and other global powers “have influence on Russia. And the more such countries we have on our side, on the side of the end of the war, I would say, the more Russia will have to move and reckon with,” he said.
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