PRUDYANKA, Ukraine – Ukrainian soldiers sat on a bench under the trees and made jokes. One jumped on a bicycle and set off on the empty road. This was the safest part of Prudyanka, a village north of Kharkiv, their commander said with a cheerful laugh.
Ukrainian troops are in a good mood in this northeastern region of Ukraine. They were part of a Ukrainian counterattack force that successfully pushed Russian troops out of Kharkiv two weeks ago, ending months of shelling of the city, Ukraine’s second-largest.
In the ensuing euphoria of overcoming this failure of Russian forces, there was talk of Ukrainian troops marching to the Russian border only 25 miles away. But this seems premature, as some Russian troops north of Kharkiv are holding on and digging in, making it much harder to return.
Although the Russians have withdrawn from the immediate outskirts of Kharkov, they are still close enough to shell the city and heavy fighting continues within the audibility of a ring of villages to the east they recently abandoned, Ukrainian troops and villagers said in interviews.
“We are afraid they will come again,” said Alder, 66, who was collecting freshly laid eggs in her village of Vilhivka, east of Kharkiv, as the bombing erupted on the other side of the hills. “God help us not to happen.”
In recent days, both armies have been exchanging artillery fire on tree-lined hills moving north and east of the city. On Thursday, black smoke rose to the horizon over several places in Russian-controlled territory.
Not surprisingly, Ukrainian forces remain confident that they will eventually defeat the Russians.
“They will lose their ability to fight the war,” said Vitaly Chorny, a member of a volunteer brigade that works as an observer flying drones to identify targets for Ukrainian artillery units. “Our boys do not feel tired, on the contrary.” But Ukrainians also say they face strong resistance from Russian forces, which have built extensive defensive positions.
“There’s a whole underground city there,” one officer said, pointing further north. He gave only his code name Tihi and his age, 31, according to military protocol. “They have trenches, bunkers, everything works underground. We tried to take it once. It was pretty scary. “
The city of Kharkov is coming back to life, with 2,000 people returning daily by train, cafes opening and public buses returning to traffic on Monday for the first time since February.
“We believe we have succeeded and they have actually lost,” said Oleh Sinegubov, the governor of Kharkiv. He gave an interview on the street under the trees, while his office in the central square of Kharkov was uprooted by direct hits from two cruise missiles in March.
Still, a tour of the villages north and east of the city revealed a more precarious situation.
As they retreated, the Russians abandoned dozens of their dead among burned tanks and armor and shattered trenches on the undulating hills. Few people have returned to the battered areas. A dead Russian soldier is still lying on the territory of a burned-out school in Vilhivka, with bare breasts, a swollen and blackened body.
A 62-year-old peasant, Nikolai, was pushing a damaged cart, which he said was carrying the body of a local man to the cemetery. Almost too upset to speak, he began to cry. “No one expected it to be so,” he said, wiping his eyes. “All the houses around me burned down.”
Russian forces that have stopped around Kharkiv since the first weeks of the invasion have been reinforced with troops withdrawn from Kyiv after the Russian attack there was defeated, Mr Chorny said.
“They were digging,” he told the Russians. “They were well prepared, serious soldiers. They had brand new tanks and good equipment, which is proof that they think the area is strategically important.
Ukrainian forces, also liberated from Kyiv, were gathering in the region at the same time. Mr Chorny was part of a group harassing Russians as they withdrew from towns and villages east of Kyiv before engaging in a counterattack in Kharkov.
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May 20, 2022, 3:02 p.m. ET
But as this quest progressed – and just after his unit suffered a painful reversal on the battlefield – the Russians abandoned their positions.
Exactly why they withdrew became clear, he said when he returned to inspect the battlefield last week and was stunned by the extent of the destruction of Russian positions inflicted by Ukrainian artillery. “I can’t even believe how hard it was for them,” he said. “It was impossible for them to stay.”
In response to urgent calls from Kyiv, several European countries sent tanks and heavier guns to Ukraine recently, while the United States sent 90 M777 long-range howitzers, which are already in operation along the 300-mile long front line to the east.
However, it remains unclear what role Western supplies of long-range howitzers and other heavy weapons have played in the counterattack against Kharkiv.
Mr Chorny said he had not seen the new howitzers used there, but that they had been used elsewhere in the region. The howitzers reportedly played a role in another catastrophic episode for Russian forces on May 11, when hundreds of soldiers were killed while trying to cross a river near Bilokhorivka in the eastern Luhansk region.
But in Kharkov, as in Kyiv before, Ukrainian troops relied mostly on the agility of their front-line observers and the responsiveness and efficiency of their artillery units.
The war between Russia and Ukraine: Key developments
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Russia’s punishment of Finland. Russia will cut natural gas supplies to Finland on May 21, according to Finland’s state energy supplier. Russia has said it is suspending supplies because Finland has not complied with its request to make payments in rubles. Finland has also applied to join NATO, which has angered Russia.
Much has been written about anti-tank missiles held over the shoulder delivered from the West to Ukrainian forces, but the biggest damage to the advancing Russian columns was from Ukrainian artillery sent by Ukrainian special forces and observers using drones, analysts at the Royal United Services Institute. in London says in a recent report.
In both cities, Russian forces were hampered by poor logistics, improper planning and open communication channels that warned Ukrainians of their movement, analysts said. Ukrainians, in contrast, had the advantage of the local population, as his eyes and ears were calling with surveillance of Russian troops.
The Russian army has rarely had to face a country with such strong artillery, tank and missile divisions, Mr Chorny said. “They were hit every day,” he said. “Every day we killed them with hundreds of high-caliber artillery shells flying at them, and thanks to our help, these hits were very accurate.”
But despite these successes, Ukrainian soldiers and officers still face the brunt of Russian firepower in the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, known collectively as Donbass.
In fact, Mr Chorny acknowledged, Ukrainian forces are likely to lose positions south and east in Donbas, where Russian forces are now concentrating.
And the fighting is still fierce in the Kharkiv region. Grieving at two military funerals in Kharkiv on Thursday, the men’s battalion said eight people were killed and 40 wounded this week alone.
A 49-year-old businessman, enlisted at the start of the war and codenamed Odin, was healing wounds to his face from a mine blast north of Kharkov in an area recently liberated by the Russians. One of his soldiers lost a leg in the blast, he said.
The first forces to enter Ukraine in February and March were mostly ill-prepared and inexperienced, Odin said. But the units now deployed are better trained and more experienced, he added.
“It’s getting a lot harder,” he said. “They are digging in and we are now facing a competent army.
Soldiers in the front-line village of Prudyanka were unable to advance for three weeks, the officer, codenamed Tihi, said because they lacked the necessary artillery support against the well dug by Russian troops.
But he was also mocking the enemy. “They are firing left and right and in front of us,” he said. “Sometimes we laugh because they shoot at each other.
As his radio came to life, he said there were ethnic conflicts between some Russian forces, including men from Dagestan in the Caucasus and the Buryats in Russia’s Far East near the Chinese border.
“God is helping us,” he said. “They shoot at each other, you stupid bastards.
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