Russia Claims Capture Of 2 More Villages Amid Kharkiv Oblast Advances

Russia's state-run RIA reporting claims from the Defence Minsitry that Russian forces have taken control of two more settlements in the Kharkiv oblast of Ukraine, the villages of Lukiantsi and Hlyboke. This comes amid a withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Lukiantsi and the town of Vovchansk towards what the Ukrainian armed forces called 'more advantageous positions'. The Russian advance in the Kharkiv region comes as the most significant military action in the war for some time.

• President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has cancelled his trip to Portugal and Spain, and will postpone all foreign trips for the immediate future in the wake of the Russian advance.
• The objectives of the Russian advance remain to be seen. The most unexpected, difficult, and costly would be the seizure of the city of Kharkiv - Ukraine's second largest. This would require a huge manpower effort from Russia, diverting troops from other areas of the front.
• The more likely aim for the Kremlin may be the establishment of a 'buffer zone' along the Russo-Ukrainian border. This would be intended to limit the ground incursions by Ukrainian forces/anti-Putin Russian nationalists into the Belgorod region that borders Ukraine.
• NYT notes: "...Russia’s progress isn’t just in the northeast. Russia has been making small but geographically broad gains across the eastern front. And what started as a modest Russian advance near Avdiivka has grown in recent weeks into a roughly 15-square-mile bulge that is complicating the defense of the Donetsk region."

Source: NYT, Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, Ukrainian officials