CNN rides along with evacuation unit in Ukraine as Russia advances on town

CNN rides along with evacuation unit in Ukraine as Russia advances on town

The Ukrainian president met with senior military commanders in hockey on Thursday. Ukraine’s second biggest city is under a renewed Russian offensive, with Russia making its biggest territorial gains in 18 months. President Zelensky says Ukrainian units in the north east are being reinforced. Well, the regional governor says Russian advances have been stopped in part as Ukraine works to stabilize the northern front line. Some of the most intense battles have been around the small town of Olshansky, about 60 kilometers from Kiev. Still, NATO’s supreme allied commander, US General Christopher Karoly, believes Ukrainian defenses will hold. No, the Russians don’t have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrough, we don’t believe. More to the point, they don’t have the skill and the capability to do it, to operate at the scale necessary to exploit any breakthrough to strategic advantage. CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh reports firsthand. Civilians, as well as soldiers are now under fire from drones and artillery fire. And now they’re just simply trying to find their way out. When nightmares reoccur, they’re often the same. And over here, they get worse. The border town of of Chance bearing the blunt horror of Moscow’s race to take as much as they can in the weeks before Ukraine starts feeling American military help again. Every street a flame. Russians deeper inside the town. Policeman Maxime is answering one of three five calls from locals on Thursday to evacuate. The day before, three colleagues were injured. The shelling never stops because you have to have specific someone. Just three people still coming out. And you have to imagine quite how desperate these final people the situation must be to leave Mykola and his wife hiding in their basement. But despite staying through the first Russian occupation and then liberation, two years ago, they found the airstrikes last night just too much. They’re joined by Maria, their mother, who can’t hear the shelling or anything too well. Thousands evacuated since Russia invaded again around here five days ago. Why everyone has to leave is clear again. As we drive out, as it is with almost every part of Ukraine Russia covets. Just utter destruction. Little left to rule over for the rebels. This is their first moment of calm in many days. Many of them entire lives in plastic bags, saying it wasn’t like last night was scary. And everyone else is talking about significant bombardment, more that it was just better to get out of there. 85 time ago, an armored ride to a new world knowing they may never get back to their homes, tormented for days by shelling. Now they have the decision which in that multi billion risky sold out in its mission. We knew I still know that only very sad. How much should the message that what are the street out on the street all the tomatoes to which we head back in with another police unit who soon learned two of the houses they must rescue from are impossible to reach. As we wait around, they hear a buzzing noise and they think they can hear a drone here. So hard to tell with the wind in the trees and the artillery. But that’s a constant threat for them now. Then our security adviser spots it. They raised their weapons. But will firing make them more of a target that’s less. Three drones, one large one that hovers and two small ones whizzing about, exposed, powerless. If we run for cover, they might come for us. All we can do is hide out of trees and hope that if we are seen, the Russians instead have a better target in mind. But they come right overhead, but noise in the car and move. They say either the sound of death or someone deciding you’re not worth that payload for. We decide to leave. But again, we cannot travel fast enough to escape. The drones only expose ourselves and prey. They lose interest. Perhaps they did. We’ll never know. But behind us, Ukraine is aflame again. Because, however, the West’s interest in this war wanes. Putin’s burns brighter than ever. Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, Fourth Chance, Ukraine. With us this hour. From Canberra, Australia is Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst of defense strategy and capability at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It’s good to see him, Malcolm, through the Wall. Thank you very much, John. I guess just very quickly off the top, the problem for Ukraine is that to defend the north, they’re now taking soldiers and forces from the south and the Russians are now exploiting those weaknesses. Exactly. And I think that the risk is that whilst the general is right, they don’t have the ability or the capable at to break through in the north. They do have the ability to force the Ukrainians to redeploy from the south to the north and from the east to the north, weakening those aspects of Ukraine’s problem. And essentially that could then allow the Russians to make further advances in the east, in the south. So, yes, no strategic breakthrough per se, at this point in time, but lots of potential tactical breakthroughs. And much of the destruction of al-Hakim is being caused by Russian glide bombs which are modified old Soviet era dumb bombs, which the Economist reports. Last year the Russians started adding simple, cheap conversion kits, wings that pop out when the bombers release a satellite guided system. And there’s now a slightly more sophisticated and accurate version which has the wings integrated into the body of the weapon, laser guidance and an anti jamming antenna. These bombs can carry a 5000 pound payload. They’re called building destroyers, and they’re precise to a point and they’re not expensive. And right now, Ukrainian air defenses are incapable of stopping them. So what are they what can they do here? Well, I think the simple solution is firstly to build up the air defenses. So there has to be a priority for military aid going into Ukraine to stop the glide bomb. Secondly, I think that the US in providing those air defenses need to essentially remove any constraints on shooting down Russian aircraft inside Russian airspace, because what the Russians are doing is launching these glide bombs from inside Russian airspace to attack targets in Ukraine. So they have a sanctuary there which they’re able to operate from in with relative invulnerability. If you take away that invulnerability and start shooting down Russian aircraft inside Russian airspace, the glide bomb threat goes away. And this has been sort of a pattern all along that the West and in particular the White House is forcing Ukraine to fight with one arm tied behind their back and time is running out because there’s a very real likelihood that come November they’ll be a different president in the White House. There’ll be no more military aid to Ukraine. They have about, what, 170 something days to make some significant effort. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. It is a worry in the sense that, you know, that $60 billion aid package was passed through Congress and signed by President Biden, but the aid itself is still moving very slowly, both in terms of ammunition for the ground forces and the air defense capabilities. So I do think that there needs to be an acceleration of the aid. And certainly the Biden administration in particular needs to, as I said, remove the shackles and allow the Ukrainians to start striking deep inside Russia with US supplied weapons, including attack arms. They also need to provide those F-16s, which would make a huge difference in terms of denying the Russians the ability to strike inside Ukraine. So all in all, the aid needs to move faster. It needs to reach the Ukrainians much more quickly. And the Biden administration needs to remove any constraints and basically allow the Ukrainians to strike deep and strike fast. And we’ve heard the assessment from Naco that with Western military assistance slowly making it way to the front lines, that Ukraine should be able to hold those defensive positions, especially considering the Russian reinforcements which are being sent by Moscow. Listen to this. If you look at the quality of the of the troops, they have a big problem still in making sure that the new troops are trained to a level that is actually better than that than the troops that were originally available. So they have now more troops, but the quality of the troops is lower than the troops. They start of the conflict with. This is a war of attrition. Who cares about the quality of Russian troops in their training? They’re just cannon fodder at the end of the day, aren’t they? Correct. And Putin doesn’t care about how many Russians die in this conflict. I think the real risk here is that as the military aid continues to trickle into Ukraine, they might get enough to hold the line. But at the end of the year, we could get a change in administration in Washington, DC that then sees any military aid to Ukraine in 2025, shut down completely. And then the Russians can bring their military industrial capacity and their superior numbers to bear and they can start to once again make advances. So I think that what we’re seeing is essentially Putin recognizing that the United States in particular, but also Europe is fearful of escalation. Putin rattles his nuclear sabers on a regular basis, and that inspires a degree of fear in an unwillingness on the part of the Biden administration to allow Ukraine to strike back hard. But certainly we lack time. We need to get that aid moving much more quickly so that Ukraine can start to make real headway. Because I really do worry that come 2025, you’re going to see a new administration in the White House, and that’s the end of any U.S. assistance to Ukraine. Malcolm, thanks for being with us. One point I would just say before we go is that, you know, the only thing which guarantees an escalation by Moscow is not standing up to Putin. We’ve seen that year after year after year from Georgia to Crimea into to this full scale invasion. So we’ll see what happens. Malcolm Exactly. Thank you So.

CNN chief international security correspondent Nick Paton Walsh joins a police evacuation unit in Vovchansk, Ukraine, as the Russian military advances on the town. #CNN #News