Pejabat militer Ukraina teratas telah memperingatkan bahwa Rusia sedang membangun pasukan di dekat Ukraina bagian timur laut, meningkatkan kekhawatiran bahwa serangan baru bisa terjadi di wilayah yang telah menjadi titik tekanan bagi pasukan Ukraina yang tegang.
Jenderal Oleksandr Syrsky, panglima tertinggi Ukraina, mengatakan pada hari Kamis bahwa Moskow sedang memindahkan pasukan menuju Vovchansk dan Lyptsi, dua desa di dekat kota Kharkiv yang pasukan Rusia telah mencoba untuk menangkap selama lebih dari dua minggu. Pejabat lain juga mengatakan bahwa Rusia telah mengumpulkan pasukan lebih ke utara, di seberang wilayah Ukraina Sumy, sebagai persiapan untuk kemungkinan serangan darat di area tersebut.
“Kekuatan ini tidak cukup untuk meluncurkan serangan besar-besaran dan menembus pertahanan kami,” tulis Jenderal Syrsky di Facebook pada hari Kamis. Namun, katanya, reorganisasi pertahanan Ukraina di area itu sedang dilakukan untuk siap menghadapi serangan.
Intruksi Rusia melintasi perbatasan menuju Kharkiv telah memperkenalkan ancaman yang mengkhawatirkan bagi militer Ukraina, yang sudah berada di bawah serangan konstan lebih jauh ke tenggara di Donbas. Komandan-komandan telah terpaksa memindahkan pasukan ke utara untuk memperkuat pertahanan sambil menunggu senjata Barat dalam jumlah yang cukup besar untuk berdampak.
Pengumpulan pasukan Rusia di utara perbatasan dekat kota Sumy, sekitar 90 mil di sebelah barat laut Kharkiv, membuat situasi menjadi lebih berbahaya, memperluas jumlah wilayah yang harus dipertahankan oleh Ukraina. Para analis mengatakan serangan di wilayah Kharkiv atau Sumy bisa membuat pasukan Ukraina terpaksan hingga batasnya dan memungkinkan Rusia untuk menembus.
Earlier this month, Russian forces opened a front in the northeastern Kharkiv region, pushing through weak Ukrainian defenses in the area and quickly capturing a dozen settlements. Ukraine ultimately managed to halt the Russian advance by slowly falling back to more heavily fortified positions.
But to fend off the Russian attacks, Ukrainian commanders have also had to rush in reserves and redeploy elite units to the northeast, weakening their positions elsewhere along the front, such as in the eastern Donetsk region, where Moscow’s forces are slowly advancing by mounting bloody sieges of towns and villages.
Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a nongovernmental research group, said, “Russia’s main goal is to expand the active front, disorganize the Ukrainian defense forces and deprive the Ukrainian command of the ability to use reserves.”
Mr. Kuzan added that forcing Ukraine to divert troops to the North would improve Russia’s prospects of capturing the Donetsk region, which Moscow formally annexed in 2022 but does not fully control. Military analysts say gaining control of the region entirely is a top priority for the Kremlin.
Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defense minister, told Reuters on Tuesday that Russia was massing thousands of troops preparing for a fresh push. “Their objective is to open a new front in the north to start using all their manpower, firing power, against us,” he said.
Ukrainian officials have warned for several days that Russia has massed some 10,000 troops across the border from the Sumy region, a force that they say is not strong enough to capture major towns or cities but could tie up Ukrainian units in the area.
Andriy Demchenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s border service, said this week that Russia was conducting reconnaissance missions there to expose the location of Ukrainian defenses.
“Attempts by subversive groups have been recorded along the entire length of the Sumy region’s border,” Mr. Demchenko told the Ukrainian news media, adding that Russian troops might at some point “try to carry out similar actions that we are now seeing in the Kharkiv region.”
Ukrainian officials have complained in recent months that they cannot prevent the buildup of troops just over the border in Russian territory because allies have banned them from firing Western weapons into Russia. Their calls to lift that ban have met with some success in recent days as France; Poland; Sweden; and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg have said that Kyiv should be allowed to strike military targets in Russia with those weapons.
The United States, the largest supplier of arms to the Ukrainian government, has not agreed to lift the ban, though a debate has opened within the Biden administration over relaxing the terms.
For now, Ukraine is left trying to fend off Russian attacks all along the front line. Russian troops have recently made marginal gains in the Donetsk region, according to maps of the battlefield compiled by independent analysts from satellite imagery and video footage of the fighting. In particular, they have reached the eastern outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a Ukrainian stronghold that is one of Moscow’s main targets.
Capturing Chasiv Yar would give Russian forces control of commanding heights in the area and expose cities that Ukraine uses as logistical hubs to increased artillery fire.
General Syrsky said on Thursday that Russia was supporting its ground assaults with airstrikes, using powerful guided bombs known as glide bombs which can carry up to a ton of explosive and can smash through concrete bunkers. He said that Ukraine urgently needed antiaircraft weapons to shoot down the planes launching the bombs.
Sweden said on Wednesday it was sending more than $1 billion of military aid to Ukraine, its biggest package so far, including air defense missiles along with surveillance and control aircraft capable of tracking fighter jets and bombers.
Ukraine’s “capability to identify targets at long range will be strengthened,” the Swedish defense minister, Pal Jonson, wrote on social media.