Russia Advances on Kharkiv as Ukraine Struggles to Fight Back

After months of attrition warfare, Russia is once again on the march in Ukraine, this time targeting Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, which is just a stone’s throw from the border with Russia. 

The attack, currently focused on breaching defenses north of the city, has already picked up steam as Ukrainian troops still wait for Western weapons to arrive en masse. Ukraine has evacuated 8,000 people from the Kharkiv region during the five-day assault, according to the national emergency services. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has canceled his foreign trips. And Ukrainian troops appear to be backing off the city of Vovchansk, a central front-line defensive position near Kharkiv.

Outgunned and outmanned, frustration is mounting in Kyiv. Ukrainian officials say Russia has succeeded in making tactically significant gains around Kharkiv in recent days in part because the Biden administration has forbidden Ukrainian troops from using U.S. weapons to fire on Russian positions across the border inside Russia. 

These targets are right in front of Ukrainian troops—Kharkiv is only 25 miles from the Russian border. They can geolocate them. But Ukrainian officials say they’re not being allowed by the White House to fire their guns en masse to hit them. 

“Easy target but no permission,” said Davyd Arakhamia, a close ally of Zelensky and the parliamentary leader of the Servant of the People party. The Russians “know that we have this limitation, political limitation, on [our] weapons. So they put the attack systems on Russian territory.”

If the Biden administration lifted that restriction, Arakhamia said, “this situation in Kharkiv would be nonexistent.”

“It’s like if somebody attacks Washington, D.C., from Virginia, and you’re saying that we can’t hit Virginia for some reason because you don’t want us to escalate with Virginia,” Arakhamia said.

Although U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, on Wednesday that Ukrainian troops can target whatever they want with U.S. weapons, Ukrainian officials insist that so far, they’ve seen no change in policy from Washington. A National Security Council spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. position not to encourage or enable Ukrainian strikes inside Russia had not changed.

“We’re not asking to shoot Moscow or something like that,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, the head of the Holos faction in Ukraine’s parliament. 

Ukrainian officials believe that the Russians aren’t trying to occupy Kharkiv as they did last time. Instead, officials say, the Kremlin is trying to destroy the city, using glide bombs that Kyiv has no ability to intercept without more air defense.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank tracking the conflict, reported on Tuesday that Russia appeared to be prioritizing creating a buffer zone on the border instead of a deeper exploitation to capture territory, although small assault groups have moved into the area. 

But the tactical advances Russia has made around areas such as Vovchansk and Buhruvatka, immediately to the northeast of Kharkiv, using tank units backing up motorized rifle battalions, have been significant enough for Zelensky to cancel his foreign travel, a sign of the seriousness of the assault. In a video message posted to Telegram on Wednesday, Zelensky also urged Western allies to expand the F-16 fighter jet coalition and speed up training and delivery to give Ukraine more air defense cover. 

The Russians have also made tactical adaptations that have put Kharkiv in increasing jeopardy. Back in the summer of 2022, the Ukrainian military had success with the U.S.-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, and other multiple launch rockets because Russian troops were fighting in the Donbas and in southern Ukraine—rather than positioning themselves inside Russian territory—and were tactically unprepared for the attacks with Western weapons. 

Now, even though the Ukrainians have a small arsenal of longer-range Western weapons—the 200-mile-range U.S. Army Tactical Missile System, the 250-mile-range British Storm Shadow, and the equivalent French SCALP EG—the Russians have adapted. They’re keeping all of their longer-range weapons on Russian territory, which means that the Ukrainians can’t shoot back. 

There’s also the ongoing problem of a lack of firepower. Ustinova said there are 10 new battalions of Ukrainian troops ready to fight but they have no weapons. 

Ukrainian lawmakers said there aren’t enough air defense systems to shield Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines, let alone protect their cities. Four more U.S.-made Patriot air defense batteries are coming—three from Germany and one from the Netherlands—but the United States isn’t providing any more at the moment. That is creating concern among Ukrainian officials that if the Russians succeed in torching Kharkiv, then places such as Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, and Sumy, the latter near Kyiv, could be next. 

“Kharkiv is going to turn into Mariupol,” said Ustinova, referring to the midsized Ukrainian city that was leveled by Russian attacks and occupied by the Kremlin in 2022.

Update, May 15, 2024: This story has been updated to include comment from the U.S. National Security Council.