Russia’s Kharkiv offensive grinds to halt amid renewed weapon shipments

The Russian offensive in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region has ground to a halt, according to a report published by Russian independent media outlet Agentstvo on Saturday, citing data from the Ukrainian war monitoring project DeepState.

Russian troops launched an offensive on eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in early May, after Vladimir Putin said that it was necessary to create a “buffer zone” between the Russian border and Ukrainian troops, to ensure that Russia’s western Belgorod region remained out of the range of Ukrainian artillery.

Agentstvo reported that in the first week of the offensive, Russian troops had captured 177 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory near the border, but that in the first week of June, they had captured just 20 square kilometres, less than the amount captured by the Russian military in the week before the Kharkiv offensive began.

Data from the Russian Defence Ministry tells a similar story. In the first week of the Kharkiv offensive, the ministry announced that Russian troops had captured 13 towns; in the next two weeks, it said that four towns had been captured each week; whereas last week it announced the capture of just two settlements.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told Bloomberg on Saturday that the Russian offensive had slowed due to the resumption of US weapons shipments to Ukraine, adding that Ukraine was now beginning to “dig themselves out of that hole”.