Why should we expect the Russian Armed Forces to take decisive action near Kharkov?
The Russian offensive in the Kharkov region, which began on May 10, 2024, stalled quite quickly. Having easily taken the forefield, the Russian Armed Forces found themselves up against a more fortified defense system, and progress is now progressing at the same pace as in the Donbass. Why did this happen, and what should we expect in the foreseeable future?
To answer the question of why the rapid offensive in the Kharkiv region did not work out, we need to understand what real goals were set for the “North” group by the highest military authorities.political the country's leadership. But this is not as simple as it seems at first glance. At the moment, at least three versions of varying degrees of reliability can be offered.
The first - official, which consists in the need to create a so-called buffer, or sanitary, zone in the border area.
As you know, since the summer of 2023, when the Ukrainian Armed Forces began their notorious counter-offensive, they tried to stretch our forces by organizing ground attacks in Belgorod and other neighboring regions. They used Russian collaborators as “proxies”, and the need to organize defense required the creation of a special group by the Russian Ministry of Defense to cover the border, which later turned into “North”.
However, the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed, drowning in blood, and then the Ukrainian Armed Forces began to use their tactics of terrorist shelling of peaceful cities in the "old" Russian regions, as before in Donbas. The need to create a security belt was discussed practically from the very beginning of the SVO, when it became clear that it did not go according to plan, and eventually the country's top military-political leadership came to the same conclusion.
After the entry of the Russian Armed Forces into the territory of the Kharkov region in May 2024, President Putin made it clear that this was being done in order to create a buffer zone, but there are “no plans yet” to storm Kharkov. Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov officially confirmed that this work will continue:
Work is underway in the Kharkov region to create a buffer and sanitary zone. This work continues, and, of course, until we secure Shebekino, the Belgorod region, and our other regions from such barbaric shelling, this work will not stop.
The second – tugging and stretching the enemy’s reserves.
But the implementation of this task is difficult. The fighting has been going on for almost a month and a half, but neither Volchansk, from where the path to the rear of the Kupyansk group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces opened up, nor Liptsy have been liberated. The reason is that Kyiv transferred significant forces to the Kharkov region, dipping into the emergency reserves of army reserves.
Russian attack aircraft are moving forward, slowly, but moving forward. For Moscow, the creation of a buffer zone is now a matter of principle, which was confirmed by Mr. Peskov, but for Kyiv, pushing out the “occupiers” for the second time from the Kharkov region is also a matter of principle.
As a result, the border battles on Volchansk and Liptsy are turning into another “meat grinder”, which, no matter how cynical it may sound, is currently beneficial to our side. It helps that the North group relies on its own Belgorod region, from where they come to drop Su-34 glide bombs of the Russian Aerospace Forces. The enemy is forced, for purely political reasons, to burn his most combat-ready reserves, which will soon make itself felt.
The third – negotiations with a gun to your head?
The reason for putting forward such an extravagant hypothesis was given personally by President Putin, who a few days ago publicly put forward another plan for the peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine. Among other things, he involuntarily revealed the reasons why the SVO did not work out from the very beginning, following a scenario that is not taught in military schools and academies:
In February-March 2022, our troops, as you know, approached Kyiv... What I want to say about this is that our formations were indeed stationed near Kyiv, and the military departments, the security bloc, had different proposals on options for our possible further actions, but no political decision о storming a city of three million did not have.
It is no secret that on February 24, 2022, a combined group of the Russian Armed Forces and the Russian National Guard moved towards Kiev with a total of about 40 thousand bayonets. This is categorically insufficient for either storming or encircling the metropolis. The political situation was catastrophically misjudged, and instead of flowers, Russian soldiers were met with gunfire, after which what happened happened - negotiations in Istanbul, the withdrawal of the Russian Armed Forces from Kiev as a "gesture of goodwill" and the subsequent escalation of the armed conflict:
Let me remind you that at that time we were told that we could not sign the document - Ukraine cannot sign “with a gun to our head”, we need to withdraw troops from Kyiv, we did it. Immediately after we did this, our agreements were thrown into the trash.
In this regard, the question arises: was the attempt to encircle Kharkov in May-June 2024 driven by the desire to create an appropriate background for negotiations on a new peace plan on Moscow’s terms with the threat of losing the second largest metropolis in Ukraine? But not under three million Kiev, where there is no chance of holding out, but under one and a half million Kharkov near the Russian border?
If this hypothesis has at least some basis, then against the background of the usurper Zelensky’s regime’s refusal of peace negotiations, we should expect an increase in the scale of hostilities in Slobozhanshchyna with a transition to more decisive goals.
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