Thousands flee Russian offensive in Kharkiv region

Fighting around Ukraine’s second largest city has so far displaced around 14,000 people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Russian forces recently began a summer offensive, grabbing several villages on Ukraine’s north-eastern frontier near the city of Kharkiv as they attempt to break through a weakened Ukrainian front line.

A Ukrainian official for the region told the AFP news agency that at least five people have been killed and another sixteen injured in a Russian drone strikes on the city overnight.

Meanwhile a Ukrainian drone strike across the border into Belgorod killed at least one person, according to Russian media.

Speaking at a press briefing, the WHO’s Jarno Habicht said that 14,000 had fled the fighting in the area, but the 189,000 people that remain near the border with Russia face “significant risks due to ongoing fighting”.

Ukraine still controls “about 60%” of Vovchansk, a border town at the heart of the recent fighting, deputy governor Roman Semenukha told national television, according to Reuters.

Another Ukrainian military official told AFP that fighting in the Kharkiv “remains difficult and is changing dynamically”.

Russia is increasingly using cheap but highly destructive “glide bombs” to advance its offensive in Ukraine. More than 200 of them are thought to have been used in just a week to pound Vovchansk.

At an unannounced trip to Kyiv on Tuesday, Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock urged the West to supply more air defence weapons so that Ukrainians are protected from the “rain of Russian drones and missiles”.