Russia is preparing a ground assault on Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv. According to GUR, Russia is training 120,000 troops for a new offensive against Ukraine. In the event of a military failure, Russia plans to turn Kharkiv into an uninhabitable city akin to Mariupol and Aleppo. -Economist



by Baysdarby

15 comments

  1. [Full article:](https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/04/07/the-kremlin-wants-to-make-ukraines-second-city-unliveable)

    It has been a few days since a 250kg Russian glide bomb landed in Iryna Tymokhyna’s courtyard on 23rd August Street, and it is fair to say she is not happy. Sitting on the park bench that has since become her living room, the 60-year-old curses Vladimir Putin and the minority of Kharkiv residents she believes are still helping him. Her apartment is covered in dust and broken glass, she says; her neighbours were put in hospital, and a passing bicycle courier was killed. “If it was up to me, I would shoot the bastards…and I’d wipe Belgorod [the closest Russian city] off the face of the earth while I was at it.”

    Ms Tymokhyna’s sharp language is striking for the fact she was born in Russia, and most of her relatives still live there. But her outrage is far from unique in a 1.3m-person city now living through an airborne terror mostly originating from the region just across the border.

    Russia stepped up its bombardment of Kharkiv in December, around the time that problems with American military assistance began to make headlines. Since then, the city has been on the receiving end of more ballistic missiles than at any time since the start of the war. Drone assaults have become more frequent: they fly faster and higher, and have a carbon wing-coating that makes shooting them down harder. But the March 27th attack on 23rd August Street was perhaps the pivotal moment, marking the first time a glide bomb, launched from a plane and capable of travelling tens of kilometres to devastating effect, had been used against Ukraine’s second city.

    The attack came just five days after a missile barrage destroyed almost all of Kharkiv’s power-generation capacity. It has been followed by more than a week of operations using glide bombs, missiles and drones, killing at least 16 and injuring another 50 or more, according to reports compiled from local news sources. There was a sinister evolution in tactics too, with “double-tap” strikes (repeated shots on the same position) that appeared to target first responders. The escalation had military sources in Kyiv suggesting that Russia has resolved to make the city a “grey zone”, uninhabitable for civilians.

    The man with responsibility for keeping Kharkiv running pushes back strongly against that hypothesis. In an interview conducted at a secret location in the industrial quarter, the mayor, Ihor Terekhov, says his city has no intention of giving up. Things were worse at the start of the war, he argues, when all but 300,000 of the pre-war population of 2m fled. “How can you make a city like this a grey zone? People won’t leave, because they have already left, then returned. They have been tortured enough already.” Yes, the challenge of powering up a city without power stations or working transformers was difficult, but they have managed it. “If I told you how we did it, that too would be targeted.” But many of the city’s problems could be solved if the West provided capable air defence systems or F-16s that could push back the fighter jets carrying the new bombs. The Economist understands that Russia destroyed some of the Western-supplied Patriot air-defence units that Ukraine had been using to protect cities like Kharkiv.

    Russia’s exact intentions are not clear at this stage, though there are signs that it is preparing for a major summer offensive. A Ukrainian source with knowledge of the intelligence picture said Russia is training six divisions (approximately 120,000 troops) in eastern Siberia. On April 3rd President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia would mobilise a further 300,000 in June. Kharkiv is one of several possible directions for a future assault. It is not the most likely, but it has already been heavily trailed in Russian media. That might indicate a Kremlin information campaign to frighten Kharkiv residents. Or it could be a nod in the direction of a pro-war camp agitating for a fiercer response to Ukraine’s frequent attacks on Belgorod, which are also causing unease in Western circles. In March, Mr Putin talked about the creation of a “buffer zone” on Ukraine’s border.

    A military operation to seize Kharkiv would be a tall order for Russia. The last time it tried, in 2022 when the city was much more poorly defended, it failed spectacularly. Taking the city would require breaking through Ukrainian defences and encircling it, which Russia is nowhere near being able to do; establishing air superiority, which is not a given; and winning a bloody urban campaign. “There’s a strong chance they would not succeed with any of that,” says Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a Ukrainian expert and former defence minister. For others, the fear remains that the Russians will turn nastier when they realise they can’t get what they want. “They won’t be able to take Kharkiv, but destroy it—perhaps,” says Denys Yaroslavsky, a local businessman turned special-forces reconnaissance commander. “We’d be talking about something of the order of Aleppo.”

    Some have already taken the hint and packed their bags. Iryna Voichuk, a journalist and former doctor, left for Europe at the end of March, shortly after the glide bombs began to hit. Her nerves could no longer take it. Leaving the city felt like leaving a friend behind, she says: “I was happy to live there despite the dangers, but that changed when a missile landed 100m away from my flat.” Much of Kharkiv’s commerce vanished in 2022 along with its richest inhabitants. The energy shortage and military escalation are testing the resolve of the enterprises that are left. Among them, there has so far been no exodus or panic besides a few isolated cases, insists Yury Sapronov, one of the few big businessmen left in the city. “I can’t say that Kharkiv is suddenly going to benefit from a massive influx of investment, since we can’t move the Russian border. But we will survive and small businesses can even prosper from internal demand.”

    If others have written Kharkiv off, those inside the city have yet to receive the memo. Urban life continues in spite of the dozen daily air-raid warnings. Families walk in the city’s central park despite the missiles that occasionally land nearby. Kids play football next to a military facility. The sense of digging in is perhaps best summed up by the city’s decision to start building its schools underground. The first of these, located in the western Industrialna district, will open this month after the spring holidays. The facility, which cost around 100m hryvnia ($2.5m), is entered via a single blast hatch that sticks out incongruously from a sports field. The school is built with reinforced concrete that goes several metres underground, and should survive anything Russia throws at it. Already all 900 spots in the first intake have been reserved.

    Ms Tymokhyna, who offers The Economist tea in her park-bench living room, says she is happy to lend a hand with any additional digging that is needed. The two years of bombs and missiles have had an impact on her health, and her nerves are shattered. For two months at the beginning of the war she lived in a tent. But, she says, there is nothing she would not do to defend the free country that for 43 years has been her home. “I’m 60 years old, but I’m ready with my spade to go wherever I’m needed,” she says. “Make Molotov cocktails, acid, whatever it takes. Ukraine is everything to me. If the Russians dare to come here, I’ll find them. They won’t have a hope of staying in the realm of the living.”

    Key points:

    ▪️ Russian forces aim to seize the city and encircle Ukrainian troops in Donbass.

    ▪️ According to Ukrainian intelligence sources, Russia is training 120,000 soldiers in eastern Siberia for a comprehensive new offensive against Ukraine.

    ▪️ To capture Kharkiv, Russia would need to breach Ukrainian defense lines and encircle the city, yet it currently lacks the capability to do so. Moreover, it would have to prevail in a grueling urban conflict, securing air superiority—a feat not guaranteed.

    ▪️ “There’s a significant chance they won’t succeed in any of these objectives,” remarked former Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Andriy Zagorodnyuk.

    ▪️ Denys Yaroslavsky of the Ukrainian Special Forces cautioned, “They might not take Kharkiv, but they could devastate it, akin to what happened in Aleppo.”

  2. In the meantime I guess it’s time for various peace loving bureaucrats to buy more paper to document the atrocities. Despicable.

  3. There is simply no reason for the EU not to go full berserk on Russia. How are we still debating helping ukraine more? How are we still exporting to Russia? How are we still allowing Russians to enter the EU? How are we still accepting 2000% export rises since the war to Tajikistan which is obviously to Russia? How are we not going to spend at least 1% of our GDP to help Ukraine and buy all the kit we can to send them? How are we not doing more to outproduce Iran and North Korea which help Russia? How are we not using all of Russias money to fund our own campaigns against it?

    All explanation and nuance goes out of the window when we see what Russia does to Ukraine and what it plans to do more.

    Of course Gaza is bad, of course Yemen is bad, of course other conflicts are bad as well, but this is a country that is very, very close to us, being raped by a country that is also very very close to us. And although it has damned itself into decline by doing this, at least the coming 10 years and maybe the coming 100 it is still capable of inflicting damage upon us which we will have a very hard time repairing.

    There will have to be consequences for all the politicians that see this as a game and want to win votes with this. This conflict is of the most central importance for every European country, all who don’t recognise it play with Europe’s existence.

  4. Time for French and Polish troops to start filtering over

  6. Looking at the map i guess they want to do that claw tactic again. Take Kharkiv and meet down at Zaporizhia. If something like this happens and NATO still dicks around…..then i don’t even know what to say anymore. 

  7. It would be a shame if Germany decided Konigsberg belonged in the EU.

  8. Appears the ongoing and standard approach of russia – be mine or die. Russkiy mir in all its destructive glory.

  9. Doubt. There is a report like this one every couple of months and yet, we didn’t see a major offensive since 2022.

  10. This could explain why we see multiple assault with overcrowded tank/APC even if RU had still reserves in storage.
    They are directing the refurbished one to the new offensive preparation and not any more on currently deployed units.

  11. The west keeps letting Russia doing what they want. The result is only blood and pain for the whole world.

  13. Daily reminder that this only happens because the Ukrainians abided by NPT.

    If Russia gets its way in Ukraine, then 50 years of NPT gets flushed down the drain and the effect of that cannot be underestimated. I can think of a dozen nation states that would strongly consider a scramble to get their own nuclear weapons program running.

  15. This is all predicted by Professor Mearsheimer. People scoff at his political theories and world view, but it is clearly stated Ruzzia will destroy what it can’t occupy and create a buffer zone between itself and NATO. The longest historical boundary is the Dnipr river. The west must not fail to support this important ally. Baltics are next then maybe more.

Leave a Reply