President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine traveled to the embattled region of Kharkiv on Thursday, meeting with top commanders as their forces fought to slow a new offensive push in the northeast while facing fierce assaults elsewhere on the front line.
The Ukrainian military reported late on Wednesday that it had repelled four ground attacks in the northeastern Kharkiv region, where Russian forces surged across the border last week and quickly captured a dozen or so villages and about 50 square miles of territory. Russia’s defense ministry did not report any new gains in the Kharkiv region over the past day.
“The situation in the Kharkiv region is generally under control,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media on Thursday after meeting in Kharkiv with Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, and other top military commanders. He also visited wounded soldiers in a hospital in the city of Kharkiv.
But he acknowledged that the military challenge in the area “remains extremely difficult,” adding: “We are strengthening our units.”
Military analysts said that the threat to Ukraine was now just as acute, or more, in other regions farther south, as Russia seeks to take advantage of Ukrainian defenses that have been depleted because Kyiv has diverted troops to shore up Kharkiv.
“Our attention is constantly focused on the front line, on all combat zones,” Mr. Zelensky said Wednesday evening, acknowledging that the challenges extended up and down the 600-mile front. “We clearly see how the occupier is trying to distract our forces and make our combat work less concentrated.”
Jack Watling, a military expert at the Royal United Services Institute of London, wrote in an analysis released on Tuesday that after attacking in the northeast, Russia would “apply pressure on the other end of the line” in the south, and try to reverse Ukraine’s gains there from its largely failed counteroffensive last summer.
That is just what appears to be happening now, with Russian troops launching assaults on the southern village of Robotyne, one of the few places that Ukraine managed to recapture during the counteroffensive.
“Russia’s aim is not to achieve a grand breakthrough, but rather to convince Ukraine that it can keep up an inexorable advance, kilometer by kilometer, along the front,” Mr. Watling wrote.
Ukrainian civilians who were evacuated from northern border villages on Thursday said that Russian forces had been fighting in small units that slipped through the forest and into villages. They have popped up unexpectedly on streets in the town of Vovchansk, a village about two dozen miles to the east of Kharkiv city that is now contested between the two armies.
Oleksiy Kharkivskiy, a police officer evacuating civilians, said the northern parts of Vovchansk were now in the sights of Russian tanks, but not fully controlled by the Russian Army, the same state of affairs as several days ago, suggesting that the fighting had slowed in and around the village, though artillery barrages are frequent.
Still, more Russian assaults were reported elsewhere, both to the east of the Kharkiv region and further to the south in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
In Robotyne, Ukrainian officials denied a claim from the Russian defense ministry that its troops had taken full control of the town, and pro-Kremlin military bloggers also denied it, saying that Russian forces controlled only parts of the village.
“Russian information troops periodically organize such provocations,” said Dmytro Pletenchuk, a spokesman for the Southern Defense Forces of Ukraine. “To do this, they organize performances in the combat zone with the installation of the Russian national flag. On the outskirts, for example, they usually die afterward.”
The battalion commander of the 65th Brigade, which is attempting to hold positions at Robotyne, said that the Russian Army had tried to enter the village again. “During last night, Russians, using small groups, entered the village of Robotyne,” said the commander, who uses the call sign Katan. “They were destroyed by our U.A.V.s inside the village.”
His assertions could not be independently verified.
At the same time, Russia’s push to take more territory in the eastern Donetsk region, one of the two regions that make up the Donbas, continued unabated. Fierce fighting is taking place around the town of Chasiv Yar, about six miles west of Bakhmut, and in the area northwest of the town of Avdiivka, which Russia captured in February.
“As I see it, Chasiv Yar is twice harsher than Kupiansk, and Kupiansk is twice harsher than the northern border,” said Pavlo, a soldier fighting in Donbas, who declined to give his last name per military protocol.
“The Kharkiv operation looks a lot like what happened earlier with the village of Ocheretyne,” he said, referring to a village northwest of Avdiivka that Russia captured in late April. “They hit several places, and where they find a crack in the defense, they enter.”
Throughout Wednesday, evacuations of residents in Ukraine’s northeast continued, and people who were fleeing the combat zones reported widespread destruction.
“We spent six days in a basement,” Daria Sorokoletova, 40, an evacuee from Vovchansk, said in a phone interview. “Now there is not a single house on our street anymore — all the houses have burned out, including those on the neighboring street.”
The attacks on northern Kharkiv region are accompanied by speculation that something similar might be coming in Sumy region, further to the northwest and also near the Russian border. Overnight, there was shelling of the region, with 183 explosions along the border area reported by the Sumy region’s military administration.
Many Ukrainian commentators said they believed that Russia’s offensive in the northeast was limited in scope and that it was intended to create panic and confuse the Ukrainian troops in order to break through Kyiv’s defenses further south.
“The main aim of Russian propaganda right now is an attempt to create panic in Kharkiv and Sumy, to convince people that these limited actions in the border area of Kharkiv region are the beginning of an offensive on Kharkiv,” Andriy Kovalenko of the Center for Countering Disinformation told Ukrainian TV RBC.
Andrew E. Kramer and Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting from Kharkiv, and Constant Méheut from Kyiv.
