Three wheels on Ukraine's wagon: the uneven fight for survival under a barrage

Askold Krushelnycky in Kharkiv meets a soldier relocated from elsewhere on the front line to hold back Russian forces

Missiles, glide bombs - with attached wings or GPS - rockets and drones. This is the aerial bombardment raining down on Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, launched by Vladimir Putin’s forces from inside Russia.

It has been backed by a ground assault, as thousands of Moscow’s soldiers have poured across the border and tried to push towards the city of Kharkiv itself. The fiercest battles have focused on the town of Vovchansk, close to the border and around 40 miles from Kharkiv. Russian forces initially overcame weak Ukrainian fortifications, penetrating a few miles and capturing two pockets with a total area of about 50 square miles.

They took a string of villages before Ukrainian reinforcements stemmed their advance. On a visit by The Independent to the area, a Ukrainian army vehicle, with only three wheels, clattered to a halt on the road. As one of his comrades pulled out tools and started work repairing the vehicle, a soldier codenamed “American” explained what had happened to the wheel: “A Russian drone with a bomb spotted us on the road. We were racing as fast as possible but couldn’t outrun it. It dropped its bomb but luckily, it hit the asphalt, not us. But it still destroyed our wheel.”

American said that as soon as the wheel was fixed, they would return to the front lines around Vovchansk. He said his unit was transferred from another part of Ukraine’s 600-mile-plus front lines. He would not say where from but said they had been deployed to Vovchansk on 7 May because, by then, it had become clear that Russian forces, massing across the border, were readying for action. The attack started on 9 May.