INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Russia on Saturday said it had captured five villages in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region during a surprise ground offensive that
prompted mass evacuations, as President Volodymyr Zelensky made an urgent call for military aid.Moscow's Defense Ministry said its troops
as well as taking one village in the Donetsk region.Ukraine's Defense Ministry said Friday Russia had launched a surprise attack on the
Kharkiv region, making small advances into a border zone from where it had been pushed back nearly two years ago
Later Saturday, Ukraine's military command said that Russia's ground troops had had air support.Zelensky said in his nightly address on
Saturday that Ukrainian troops had been carrying out counterattacks in border villages in the Kharkiv region."Disrupting Russian offensive
plans is now our number one task," he said.There has been "heavy fighting" in the border area and 1,775 people have been evacuated, Kharkiv
regional governor Oleh Syniehubov wrote on social media earlier Saturday.Two men aged 50 and 48 were killed and two wounded by guided aerial
bomb attacks on the town of Vovchansk close to the border, Syniehubov added later
He posted video from Vovchansk showing windows blown out of a multi-story block of flats and shattered houses on fire.The governor insisted
there was "no threat of a ground operation" for the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest.Groups of people fleeing the border area were
arriving in vans and cars loaded with bags at a reception center for evacuees near Kharkiv, AFP journalists saw.'Impossible to live
Nikolaieva, told AFP she had fled the border village of Lyptsi along with her 81-year-old mother."It's impossible to live there," said
Nikolaieva, adding that her family "stayed there until the last moment" without gas or electricity."There is constant incoming fire: those
guided aerial bombs and mortar shells whistling overhead
It became very scary," she said.An aid worker helping evacuate residents, Dmytro Tkachenko, 37, told AFP: "There is a really hard, difficult
situation in the directions of Vovchansk and Lyptsi."There is some (troop) movement and at the moment, it really complicates the evacuation
from these areas, because it's really dangerous."'Saves lives'The Kharkiv region has been mostly under Ukrainian control since September
2022.Zelensky said Saturday troops must "return the initiative to Ukraine" and urged Kyiv's allies to speed up arms deliveries."Every
air-defence system, every anti-missile system is literally what saves lives," Zelensky said."It is important that our partners support our
brought to Ukraine, not just the announced ones."Ukrainian forces have multiplied attacks inside Russia and Russia-held areas of Ukraine,
particularly on energy infrastructure.Also Saturday, a missile strike killed three people when it hit a restaurant called Paradise in the
Russian-held city of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.The attack using U.S
HIMARS precision rocket launchers killed two diners and a restaurant worker and wounded nine, officials from the Russian-backed
administration said.'Not a big offensive'Officials in Kyiv had warned for weeks that Moscow might try to attack its northeastern border
regions, pressing its advantage as Ukraine struggles with delays in Western aid and manpower shortages.Ukraine's military said it had
deployed reserve units "to strengthen the defense in these areas of the front."Military expert Olivier Kempf told AFP Saturday that Russia's
ground operation was most likely aimed at creating a buffer zone near its Belgorod region, recently raided by pro-Ukrainian units, or
diverting Ukraine's resources from the Donetsk region."Twenty-four hours after the launch of the operations, it doesn't look like a big
offensive," said the associate fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research, a French think tank.Washington announced a new $400 million
military aid package for Kyiv hours after the offensive began, and said it was confident Ukraine could repel any fresh Russian campaign.
