Capturing Ukraine’s Kharkiv is not part of Russia’s current plan, says Putin
President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that capturing the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was not part of Russia’s current plan and that Russian forces operating nearby were creating a “buffer zone” for Russia’s own security.
Putin, who said that all of the military operations were proceeding according to plan, was speaking at a new conference in China.
Key events
A long-range Ukrainian strike on the Moscow-controlled Belbek airbase in occupied Crimea destroyed three Russian warplanes and a fuel facility near its main runway this week, US commercial satellite company Maxar said.
The company cited satellite imagery taken on Thursday as showing that two MiG-31 fighter jets and an Su-27 fighter jet had been destroyed. It said one MiG-29 fighter aircraft also appeared to have been damaged.
Ukraine has not publicly claimed responsibility for striking the airbase, Reuters reported.
Fighting ‘to intensify’ in Sumy as Russian forces make further advances in Kharkiv
Russian forces expanded the area of active combat by almost 70 km by launching their offensive in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Friday.
Syrskyi said Russia launched the offensive to force Ukraine to throw additional reserve brigades into fighting.
He added that he expected fighting to intensify as Kyiv troops are also preparing to defend in northern region of Sumy.
Ukraine needs more long-range weapons to fight off Russian advances in the northern Kharkiv region where the situation around the country’s second-largest city remains “highly dramatic”, Germany’s foreign minister said on Friday.
Russian forces have made inroads of at least several kilometres in the region in recent days, forcing Kyiv’s out-manned troops to try to hold the line on a new front as Moscow mounts more pressure on the front in the east.
It is important to cut off Russian supply routes and give Ukraine weapons “that can be used over medium and long distances,” Annalena Baerbock said on the sidelines of a meeting of the foreign ministers in Strasbourg.
“We are also working with other partners on this.” Overall, it is an “extremely difficult situation,” she added.
Patrick Wintour
A plan for Ukraine to be given an invitation to join Nato by the summer of 2028 will be rejected when the alliance meets for its annual summit in Washington this summer, one of the key promoters of the idea admitted on Thursday.
Kurt Volker, a former US Ambassador to Nato, warned the US and Germany will veto the plan, sending a signal to Vladimir Putin to keep going, adding: “it means the war is likely to last at least another year.”
The proposals for Ukraine to be given a guaranteed Nato membership date were published earlier this week by a working group on which Volker sat that was chaired by the head of the Ukraine Presidential office Andriy Yermak and the former Nato secretary general Andris Rasmussen.
The report, backed by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, had been regarded as Ukraine’s best hope of setting a specific date by which it would enjoy the protection of Nato, overcoming the disappointment of the Vilnius Nato summit last year in which Ukraine was offered no route map to membership.
Russia with respond in kind to any ambiguous nuclear behaviour from the West, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, was reported as saying by the TASS news agency.
According to Ryabkov, the West has adopted a stance of strategic uncertainty and ambiguity towards Russia, trying to make it difficult for Moscow to predict how Nato will react in various situations, including with nuclear weapons.
“Russia will put the topic of ‘red lines’ aside and will respond to the West in a mirror manner,” Ryabkov said in an interview to state-run TASS news agency
Zelenskiy says situation in Kharkiv region “stabilised” – reports
Russian forces have advanced 10 km into Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in one area but the situation has “stabilised” as of Friday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said as cited by RBC-Ukraine media outlet.
“Today, our defence forces have stabilised the Russians where they are now. The deepest point of their advance is 10 km,” Zelenskiy told journalists.
Ukrainian forces shot down all 20 drones Russia dispatched in an overnight attack, the Ukrainian military said on Friday.
The drones were shotdown over the regions of Kharkiv, Poltava, Vinnytsia, Odesa and Mykolaiv, Reuters reported.
Russian forces have increasingly targeted Kharkiv region this spring, intensifying the aerial attacks and mounting a new offensive in the border areas forcing Kyiv’s outnumbered troops to try to hold the line on a new front.
Kharkiv city mayor Ihor Terekhov reported four explosions during the attack, writing on the Telegram messaging app that one of the strikes caused a fire.
The attack damaged five buildings, one of them belonging to the district administration, Kharkiv’s regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said on Telegram.
Massive Ukrainian drone attack on Crimea causes power cutoffs in Sevastopol
A massive Ukrainian drone attack on Crimea early on Friday caused power cutoffs in the city of Sevastopol and set a refinery ablaze in southern Russia, Russian authorities said.
The drone raids marked Kyiv’s attempt to strike back during Moscow’s offensive in northeastern Ukraine, which has added to the pressure on outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces who are waiting for delayed deliveries of crucial weapons and ammunition from Western partners.
The Russian defence ministry said air defences downed 51 Ukrainian drones over Crimea, another 44 over the Krasnodar region and six over the Belgorod region. It said Russian warplanes and patrol boats also destroyed six sea drones in the Black Sea, AP reported.
Mikhail Razvozhayev, the governor of Sevastopol, which is the main base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, said the drone attack damaged the city’s power plant. He said it could take a day to fully restore energy supplies and warned residents that power would be cut to parts of the city.
Massive overnight Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Novorossiysk port and the northern Caucasus, as well we Sevastopol in Crimea. Russian officials say, as usual, that all the drones were shot down. Footage below from the successful defense of the Tuapse refinery, Rosneft’s… pic.twitter.com/bdBUSslpFF
— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) May 17, 2024
“Communal services are doing their best to restore the power system as quickly as possible,” he said in a statement.
Razvozhayev also announced that schools in the city would be closed temporarily.
Opening summary
Good morning and welcome to the Ukraine live blog. We start with news that the Ukrainian artillery on the Kharkiv frontline is facing a bigger threat than ever from Russia’s fleet of Lancet kamikaze drones, according to a howitzer crew fighting there.
“One comes, then a second one comes, 10 minutes later a third one comes,” said call sign Artist, the fresh-faced 21-year-old commander of an artillery battery of the 42nd Brigade which has been firing non-stop to repel Russia’s new offensive in the region over the past week.
The soldiers requested that they only be referred to by their military call signs to protect their identities, Reuters reported.
The drone, with X-shaped wings and carrying several kilograms of explosive, was already one of the biggest threats to Ukrainian artillery and armour for over a year.
However, the crew of the Soviet-era self-propelled 2S1 Gvozdika howitzer that Reuters spoke to had never seen anything close to the number of Lancets flying in the skies of the Kharkiv region, despite having seen plenty of service on several of the most intense parts of the frontline.
In other news:
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Russia does not have sufficient forces on the ground to make a major breakthrough in Ukraine after launching its offensive in the Kharkhiv region, Nato’s supreme allied commander for Europe, Christopher Cavoli, said on Thursday. “More to the point they don’t have the skill and the ability to do it,” said the US general. “I’ve been in very close contact with our Ukrainian colleagues and I’m confident that they will hold the line.
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Ukraine said on Thursday it was trying to “stabilise” the frontline in the Kharkiv region. Moscow has seized 278 sq km (107 sq miles) of Ukrainian territory between 9 and 15 May, based on data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). It represents the largest territorial gain in a single operation since mid-December 2022. Cavoli said Ukraine’s forces were “being shipped vast amounts of ammunition, vast amounts of short range air defence systems and significant amounts of armoured vehicles right now”.
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Dan Sabbagh writes that Russia’s rapid advances in Kharkiv raise serious questions about Kyiv’s ability to defend itself. Russia had telegraphed the operation in advance and Ukraine was warned by western intelligence, Sabbagh writes – though military analysts stress there are explanations for why Ukraine has been forced back. “It’s suicidal for Ukraine to have its main line of defence on the border, where the Russians can hit you with artillery and glide bombs and the Ukrainians don’t have weapons available like Himars rocket artillery to hit back because of US restrictions,” said George Barros, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War. As a result, Russian forces were able to mass across the border in a relatively safe space, then mobilise into a lightly populated “grey zone” of Ukraine.
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Ukraine accused Russia of capturing and killing civilians in the border town of Vovchansk and of keeping about 35 to 40 people as “human shields”. “According to operational information, the Russian military, trying to gain a foothold in the city, did not allow local residents to evacuate,” said the interior minister, Igor Klymenko. “They began abducting people and driving them to basements.” Sergiy Bolvinov, head of the Kharkiv region’s police investigation department: “The Russians keep them in one place and actually use them as a human shield, as their command headquarters is nearby.” There was no immediate response from Moscow to the allegations.
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy met military leaders in Kharkiv city and said: “The situation in the Kharkiv region is generally under control, and our soldiers are inflicting significant losses on the occupier. However, the area remains extremely difficult. We are reinforcing our units.”
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A protracted air raid alert in most of the Kharkiv region was lifted early on Friday. The regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said at least five drones struck Kharkiv. The public broadcaster Suspilne said an air raid alert had been in effect for more than 16 1/2 hours in Kharkiv city, the longest recorded since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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Ukrainian attacks have destroyed one or more Russian warplanes and infrastructure at the Belbek airbase in occupied Crimea, according to reporting based on satellite imagery and other resources. The pro-Ukrainian partisan force Atesh said a warehouse at Belbek was hit, destroying ammunition for Russian warplanes. Multiple fires at the Belbek complex have been detected by Nasa’s satellite fire tracking service, Firms, in recent days. Ukrainian strikes using Atacms missiles were characterised by occupation authorities as having been repelled, in line with standard Russian official language playing down Ukrainian operations.
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The US has announced sanctions on two Russian individuals and three Russian companies for facilitating arms transfers between Russia and North Korea, including ballistic missiles for use against Ukraine.
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Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of the North Korean ruler, Kim Jong-un, denied arms exchanges with Russia, state media KCNA reported. However, UN sanctions monitors have determined that debris from a missile that landed in Kharkiv was from a North Korean Hwasong-11 series ballistic missile. US state department spokesman Matthew Miller said Russia had already used upwards of 40 North Korean-produced ballistic missiles against Ukraine, as well as munitions, having imported them in contravention of UN resolutions.
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The International Monetary Fund will start a new Ukraine mission in coming weeks to assess its $15.6bn loan programme and latest economic developments, IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack said. The loan review mission also will revise the IMF’s analysis of Ukraine’s debt sustainability. “The Ukrainian economy has shown remarkable resilience. Although the outlook does remain subject to exceptionally high war-related uncertainty.”