Isabelle Khurshudyan, Paul Sonne, Serhiy Morgunov and Kamila Hrabchuk
KHARKIV, Ukraine — After weeks of fighting for scraps of territory on the war’s bloodiest front, Oleh, a 21-year-old Ukrainian company commander, was summoned suddenly last August, along with thousands of other soldiers, to an obscure rendezvous point in the Kharkiv region.
At his last position, relentless Russian artillery fire had stalked his men’s every step. But here, in a patch of villages, farmland and streams in Ukraine’s northeast, the quiet was deeply alarming. “The silence bothered me the most,” Oleh said. “It seemed off. How could this be?”
Even more unsettling were the orders his superiors handed down: to charge as far as 40 miles into enemy territory at high speed in an audacious, top-secret counteroffensive — directly between the Russian-occupied stronghold of Izyum and Russia’s own Belgorod region dotted with military bases. It seemed preposterous. “Some kind of dubious operation,” Oleh said.
But after a summer of heavy Russian casualties and President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to conscript reinforcements, the Kremlin’s troops were badly depleted. A shift of units south — to defend the captured regional capital of Kherson amid talk of a big Ukrainian push there — had left the Kharkiv area exposed.
It was a stunning vulnerability, confirmed by Ukrainian reconnaissance teams and small drones. And Kyiv would exploit it to change the dynamic of the war, and achieve Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of redrawing the battlefield map before winter.
After Russia’s invasion began on Feb. 24, Ukrainian troops forced Russia’s retreat from Kyiv in an underdog triumph that ended the first stage of the conflict. Thwarted from conquering the capital, Russia concentrated its power in the south and east, pummeling Ukrainian forces until new, longer-range weapons arrived from the United States and Europe and helped stall Moscow’s advances. Ukraine had survived but, after a half-year of war, one-quarter of its territory was still occupied and its military had failed to show it could launch an offensive to retake substantial ground.
That was about to change.
In early September, Ukrainian forces would steamroll across hundreds of square miles, routing the Russians and surprising themselves. The Kharkiv offensive revealed the inability of an undermanned and underequipped Russian force to hold territory across a vast front. It shocked the Kremlin, and it proved to Ukraine’s supporters that they were not wasting billions in weapons and economic aid.
A Russian military vehicle and ammunition left behind in the Kharkiv region after Ukraine’s armed forces carried out a surprise counteroffensive. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
Putin was forced to conscript hundreds of thousands of men, making the costs of war clear to a Russian population that had isolated itself from its leader’s “special military operation.” The mobilization set off unrest but was too late to stop Ukraine’s momentum from spreading south to Kherson, where, after hard combat and significant losses, Kyiv’s forces in November recaptured the only regional capital that Putin had seized since the start of the war.
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