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Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine - and an easy target for the Russian army.
The recent attacks reveal a major problem.
Kharkiv - The 59-year-old soldier in an air defense unit had just started his shift in a snowy forest near the Russian border when a bright light shone on the horizon early Tuesday.
He picked up his radio and barked an urgent message: "I'm seeing flashes and hearing emanating booming noises!"
The soldier in the Ukraine war knew that these were ballistic missiles launched from Russia.
But he had no time to stop them - and no weapon in his unit's arsenal that could.
Seconds later, the rockets struck Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, destroying a residential building and other civilian facilities.
Ten people, including a child, were killed and dozens of others were injured.
Some victims were trapped under the rubble for hours.
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“It was clear to me that they would fly and hit people and that there was nothing I could do to prevent that,” said the soldier, who according to military regulations could only be addressed by his first name, Grandpa.
The pain of this helplessness is a feeling he “can’t put into words,” he said.
Russia shelled Kharkiv, just 19 miles south of the border, three times on Tuesday: first at 4 a.m., then just after 7 a.m. and again just before 10 p.m.
Twice the city's air raid siren, warning civilians to seek safety, went off only after the explosions began.
The consequences of a rocket hitting a residential building in Kharkiv on Tuesday.
© Alice Martins/The Washington Post
Ukraine War: Vulnerabilities in Ukrainian air defense systems
The attacks, which Ukraine said were combined strikes fired in part from S-300 systems inside Russia, were the latest in a series of attacks apparently aimed in part at exploiting vulnerabilities in Ukrainian systems to exploit air defense systems.
The second of Tuesday's three salvos, which Grandfather observed during his shift, was a combined attack that also hit Kiev and the southeastern Dnipro region.
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The rocket attacks show that Russian President Vladimir Putin is more willing to destroy Ukraine than allow the country to pursue an independent, democratic future in the European Union.
They also show that Ukraine still does not have sufficient air defense, even after the West equipped Kiev with a number of systems such as NASAMS, Iris-Ts, Gepard, Stingers and others.
The use of such systems was called into question on Wednesday after Russia accused Ukraine of shooting down a military transport plane in nearby Belgorod that Moscow said was carrying dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Ukraine has not denied shooting down the plane, but officials said they had not confirmed that prisoners of war were on board.
Ukraine War: For Russia, Kharkiv is one of the easiest targets
For Russia, Kharkiv is one of the easiest destinations.
The city is so close to the border that even modern air defense systems, such as the American-built Patriot that Ukraine deploys in Kiev, would have difficulty responding in a timely manner to high-speed missiles moving on a ballistic trajectory.
The proximity to Russian launch pads means that the time between launch and landing is typically less than a minute.
Grandfather belongs to the 113th Territorial Defense Brigade, a unit responsible for protecting the skies north of Kharkiv.
His unit relies on a Soviet-era ZU-23-2, a trophy weapon confiscated from Russian troops who abandoned them while retreating from the nearby town of Kupyansk in September 2022.
A member of a Ukrainian air defense unit in the back seat of a truck with a mounted ZU-23-2 north of Kharkiv on Tuesday.
© Alice Martins/The Washington Post
The mobile system, mounted on the back of a truck, can only hit targets moving below the speed of sound.
This includes the growing number of drones launched daily from Russia, e.g.
B. Iranian-made Shaheds and explosive FPVs (first-person view drones).
Some of these weapons are aimed at troops stationed north of the city, an area that Russia stormed and occupied in early 2022.
Others target Kharkiv itself, which Russia was never able to take.
Recently, however, Moscow appears to have renewed its sights on Kharkiv and the surrounding region, which it abandoned during Ukraine's lightning counteroffensive in September 2022.
By Serhii Korolchuk
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on January 25, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now available in translation and in an abridged version to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.