KYIV, Ukraine — With Ukrainian towns and cities on edge in advance of a major Russian holiday dedicated to military victory, new fighting flared Saturday along the eastern front lines as authorities redoubled efforts to pluck civilians from the last sliver of Ukrainian-held territory in the shattered port city of Mariupol.
At the same time, the Ukrainian military said its troops had managed to push Moscow’s forces back from some artillery positions near Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city. Located at the northeastern tip of the battle zone, just 25 miles from the Russian border, the city has been under relentless bombardment since the war’s earliest days.
More than 5.8 million refugees have fled fighting in Ukraine, according to the United Nations, and Jill Biden, visiting Romania, praised its government and those of other front-line states for taking in those trying to escape the war.
“I think this is really, unfortunately, just the beginning — just the beginning,” she said of the largest refugee crisis on the continent since World War II. The first lady spoke in Bucharest, Romania, on the second day of a four-day trip to Romania and Slovakia, both of which border Ukraine.
In an operational report early Saturday, the Ukrainian army said its troops have been waging a counteroffensive near Kharkiv, and that Russian forces had blown up three road bridges in an attempt to slow down that push.
While the city itself has remained in Ukrainian hands throughout the war, the Russian army has used captured outlying areas as a base from which to batter Kharkiv, which was home to nearly 1.5 million people before the Feb. 24 invasion.
Ukraine also claimed Saturday to have destroyed a Serna-class Russian landing craft in the Black Sea with a drone strike, an assertion that could not immediately be verified. Last month, the Russian fleet’s Black Sea flagship was sunk by what Russia said was an accidental ammunition explosion and Ukraine — backed by Western military officials — said was a Ukrainian missile strike.
After a string of stinging setbacks for Russia, Ukraine is wary that Moscow will lash out in frustration. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his late-night video address Friday, implored Ukrainians to exercise caution over the weekend in advance of Russia’s Victory Day celebrations Monday.
On Saturday, larger numbers of troops than usual could be seen patrolling the streets of Kyiv, the capital.
“I ask all our citizens — especially these days — not to ignore the air-raid sirens,” Zelenskyy said. “Please, this is your life, the life of your children.”
In a show of support for Ukraine, the leaders of the world’s seven largest advanced economies, including the United States, will hold video consultations with Zelenskyy on Sunday.
President Joe Biden will participate in the Group of Seven talks with the Ukrainian leader, which are meant in part to stress common resolve in response to the 10-week-old war, the White House said. The G-7 also includes Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy.
There is expected to be an abundance of bellicose Kremlin rhetoric associated with the holiday, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, but Ukraine is also braced for potentially punishing strikes on civilian areas, or some new effort by Moscow to seize the military initiative in what Western analysts and military officials depict as a brutal but faltering offensive.
In an analysis released Saturday, British military intelligence cited “a heavy toll on some of Russia’s most capable units” in fighting to date. Plagued by supply-line problems, heavy casualties and low troop morale, the Russian command last month broke off an attempt to seize Kyiv and shifted its attention to the eastern front.
“It will take considerable time and expense for Russia to reconstitute its armed forces following this conflict,” the British assessment said.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank that has been monitoring battlefield developments, pointed in its latest assessment to the Ukrainian counteroffensive outside Kharkiv, saying Ukrainian troops “may successfully push Russian forces out of artillery range” of the city in coming days.
In the ongoing battle for control of territory in the eastern Donbas region, the Ukrainian military said Saturday its troops had repulsed eight Russian attacks in the last 24 hours. Russia, meanwhile, stepped up what it says are attacks taking aim at Ukrainian infrastructure and Western-supplied weaponry.
Russia’s defense ministry claimed Saturday to have destroyed a cache of armaments from the U.S. and European allies near a railway station in the Kharkiv region. It also said Russian forces struck 18 military facilities overnight, including three ammunition depots outside the Black Sea port of Odesa. The claims could not immediately be independently verified.
Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, said new efforts would be made Saturday to evacuate civilians from the giant Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where hundreds of civilians have sheltered for weeks along with Ukrainian troops. Ukraine said about 50 civilians were brought out Friday.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said Friday’s evacuees included women, children and elderly people, adding that the operation would continue on Saturday. She said the rescue effort was slowed by Russian violations of a local cease-fire.
In his overnight address, Zelenskyy said a diplomatic effort was being made to save the steel plant’s Ukrainian military defenders from a feared slaughter. The forces inside the complex have so far rebuffed Russian surrender demands, but officials are worried that Moscow wants the steelworks flattened as a symbolic prize in advance of Victory Day.
Zelenskyy said that “influential intermediaries are involved, influential states,” in a bid to broker a deal, but gave no details.
