There is talk in Ukraine of a new Russian military offensive in Kharkiv and Sumy regions. Some believe that it is already underway and are also concerned about the huge recruitment of new recruits for the Russian army. What exactly is happening?
At the meeting of European leaders in Paris at the end of March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia is preparing for a new offensive - in Sumy, Kharkiv and Zaporizhia regions. On Thursday, April 10, he repeated the same. According to him, the Russians can use the 67,000 soldiers currently stationed in the Kursk region to launch an offensive in the Sumy region.
To thwart these plans, Ukraine has taken steps in recent days - both in the Kursk and Belgorod regions of the Russian Federation. According to Zelensky, this has prevented the Russians from forming an offensive strike force as they had planned.
The Russian offensive is already underway
A day earlier, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Oleksandr Syrsky said that the Russian army's offensive has "actually" already begun - in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions. According to him, this is evidenced by the intensification of the Russian offensive in all main directions over the past week. However, Syrsky's statement was later somewhat softened by the General Staff. "We are not talking about fundamental changes on the front," spokesman Dmitry Likhovy wrote on Facebook.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which regularly analyzes the situation on the front in Ukraine, also describes the situation less dramatically. In its report dated April 9, the analysts wrote that Russian troops "continue to advance slowly along the borders of Sumy and Kursk regions". At the same time, it is specified that the Russian units in this area “will hardly be able to launch a large-scale offensive operation towards the city of Sumy in the near future, unless they receive significant reinforcements”.
"The Russians want to increase the speed of their advance"
However, it is possible that the Russians will soon receive reinforcements, since their army numbers between 650,000 and 700,000 soldiers, says Markus Reisner, an Austrian military historian, officer in the General Staff of the Austrian Army and head of a department at the Military Academy in Vienna. "This means that they now have many more soldiers than at the beginning of the fighting in Ukraine three years ago. And new ones are constantly arriving at the front", he notes. According to the expert, after the end of the Kursk operation, i.e. pushing most of the Ukrainian units out of Russian territory, many Russian servicemen can now be transferred to other parts of the front. The attempt to capture the village of Basovka in the Sumy region shows that the Russians "want to increase the speed of advance in the direction of the Sumy region and the city of Sumy itself", Colonel Reisner also believes.
In addition, every month the Russian army is replenished with about 30-40 thousand new contract soldiers, who can compensate for losses along the entire front line, the observer points out. He does not rule out the fact that Russia is preparing new military units, as well as using new tactics to increase the combat capability of its units - for example, by distributing new soldiers into brigades with combat experience.
Markus Reisner believes that the zone of the potential Russian offensive is not limited to the Sumy region. Among the problematic areas of the front, he points to Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region, Liman, Toretsk and Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. "Even in the Zaporizhia region there is a lot of fighting, so there are several areas where new Russian reinforcements could end up," says the Austrian military.
Russia wants to create a buffer zone in the Sumy region
Ukrainian expert Mikhail Samus assesses the situation in the Sumy region more moderately. He sees the current actions of the Russian army as a continuation of their efforts to create a buffer zone in the Sumy region: "The offensive, the offensive operation is something specific, with specific goals. So there is no ‚operation‘“," he tells DW. Rather, the Russian army is conducting tactical actions with the aim of “interrupting the logistical routes for supplying Ukrainian units“ in the Kursk and Belgorod regions of the Russian Federation. In the Kharkiv region, Samus does not see any significant changes on the battlefield.
"As for the Kupyansk direction - there are indeed attempts to advance in the Chasov Yar and Toretsk areas in order to increase pressure in the areas of Konstantinovka, Kramatorsk and Slavyansk", adds the Ukrainian observer. But there is nothing new in these actions of the Russians either.
They are recruiting 160,000 new soldiers
Amidst reports of a possible new Russian offensive, concern in Ukraine is also being raised by the fact that a large-scale spring campaign to recruit more soldiers is currently underway in the Russian Federation. President Vladimir Putin signed a decree according to which 160,000 people are to be called up for the army. This is almost 30,000 more soldiers than during the autumn draft, which took place at the end of 2024. At that time, 133,000 people were called up for the Russian army.
However, it is unlikely that the new recruits will be sent to the front line. Rather, the expansion of the army’s size speaks of something else - that Russia is pursuing a longer-term goal, namely - the complete conquest of Ukraine. – This is a further escalation, because it shows that Putin has no intention of accepting any peace agreement or anything like that. It is quite obvious that he wants to get the most out of it. "That's why we see more people being drafted into the army than before," Reisner says.
No connection with the situation on the front?
Military analyst Anders Nielsen from the Royal Danish Defense College does not see a direct connection between the two - that Russia is actively recruiting more soldiers and what is happening on the front in Ukraine. In the first, he sees a manifestation of the general trend of increasing the size of the Russian army. "Of course, some of these soldiers may end up in Ukraine at some point - either voluntarily, or they will be forced to do so, as they will sign a contract with the army," he says.
Russian political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin, however, connects the recruitment of new conscripts precisely with the course of the war in Ukraine. According to him, many things indicate that "Russia is preparing for a serious offensive as May approaches, when the soil dries up. That's why it needs more manpower." It's also interesting how he explains the logic of the Russian military machine: "The drug of war works like this: War is a holy cause, we simply cannot lose it. We must tighten our belts, grit our teeth, and resist the entire West that has attacked us," goes the narrative in Russia.