\n<\/p>\n
As fighting continued to flare along the Russia-Ukraine border on Saturday, civilians fleeing for their lives stepped out of evacuation vans one by one, some on unsteady legs.<\/p>\n
An older woman struggled with two large, confused dogs. A boy clutched his birth certificate, laminated and worn. An older couple grumbled at each other about who was going to lug their heavy bag. Another woman gingerly carried a wire cage holding a bright green parrot.<\/p>\n
Even the bird inside, which provided the one drop of color in a grim tableau, seemed desperate to flee the shelling, said the woman, Natasha Radchenko.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was shaking,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd hiding.\u201d<\/p>\n
After two long years, the war in Ukraine keeps finding new zones of misery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Over the past two days, several thousand civilians who had hung on through some very tough times finally abandoned their homes in Ukraine\u2019s northeast after the Russians opened a new front.<\/p>\n
On Friday at dawn, Russian troops launched a complex attack with aircraft, artillery, infantry troops and armor, surging across the border near Kharkiv, Ukraine\u2019s second largest city. By all accounts \u2014 and by the shudders of enormous bombs hitting the ground not far from the evacuation point \u2014 the two sides are now locked in heavy fighting over a string of villages just a few miles inside Ukrainian territory.<\/p>\n
By Saturday evening, it wasn\u2019t clear who was winning. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have captured five border settlements, which Ukraine denied, though one independent military analyst said that geolocated footage showed Ukrainian drone strikes on presumed Russian armor that had, indeed, crossed the border. Ukrainian officials said that they were counterattacking and that the Russians had advanced no more than three miles beyond the border.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Military analysts say they believe the incursion may be part of a wily Russian strategy, not necessarily to open a new line of attack on Kharkiv but to suck away Ukraine\u2019s forces from other battlefields where the Ukrainians are already worn out and stretched thin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt is likely the coming weeks will be a very grim affair for the Ukrainian ground forces in the east,\u201d <\/em>said Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group, in an initial assessment<\/a> of the offensive.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile the attacks at present appear to be small in scale,\u201d he said, the purpose is to \u201cdent Ukrainian morale \u2014 both civilian and military.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Ryan added, \u201cIf the Ukrainians decide to hold ground at all costs, they will lose more of their increasingly smaller army.\u201d<\/p>\n The result, he said, could be \u201ca severe test,\u201d and \u201cone of the toughest moments for Ukraine in the war so far.\u201d<\/p>\n Military analysts say the new offensive is unlikely to reach the streets of Kharkiv. The Ukrainian military has built elaborate defenses around the city \u2014 digging miles of trenches and sowing the landscape with glistening razor wire, mines and countless small cement pyramids that block tanks \u2014 \u201cdragons\u2019 teeth,\u201d as the soldiers here call them. Ukrainian officials, from President Volodymyr Zelensky on down, have also indicated they are rushing in reinforcements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Still, Ukraine must be careful how it responds, given its depleted military. Supplies from a long-delayed American aid package are only beginning to trickle to the front lines, leaving the Ukrainians more vulnerable than they have been in months.<\/p>\n