RUSSIAN FORCES HAVE now captured six villages as part of a renewed ground assault in Ukraine’s north east, the country’s Defence Ministry said.

Ukrainian journalists reported yesterday that Russian troops had taken the villages of Borysivka, Ohirtseve, Pylna and Strilecha, all of which are in a militarily contested “grey zone” on the border of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region and Russia.

Russian officials said they had also captured another village, Pletenivka, in a renewed attack on the region that Ukrainian authorities said forced more than 1,700 civilians to flee.

The village of Keramik in the Donetsk region was also now under Russian control, the  military said.

Ukrainian officials said that the country’s forces were resisting but there was heavy fighting in the Kharkiv region near the border.

“Fighting for villages… continues in the border area”, Ukrainian military spokesman Nazar Voloshyn said on national television, while “the enemy is currently localised”.

There is “heavy fighting” in the border area and 1,775 people have been evacuated, Kharkiv regional governor Oleg Synegubov wrote on social media.

Two men aged 50 and 48 were killed and two others were wounded by guided aerial bomb attacks on the town of Vovchansk close to the border, Synegubov said later. He posted video from Vovchansk showing windows blown out of a multi-storey block of flats and shattered houses on fire.

He insisted there was “no threat of a ground operation” for Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv.

At an arrival point for evacuees near Kharkiv, groups of people were arriving in vans and cars loaded with bags.

Evacuees – many of them elderly – received food and medical assistance in makeshift tents.

Police evacuate elderly people following the Russian attack around the town of Vovchansk in Kharkiv region yesterday. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

One 61-year-old woman, Lyubov Nikolaieva, told the AFP news agency 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”.

“There is constant incoming fire: those guided aerial bombs and mortar shells whistling overhead. It became very scary,” she said.

Russian forces continued to pummel the nearby city of Vovchansk with air strikes and grad rockets today as police and volunteers evacuated the residents.

Associated Press journalists who accompanied an evacuation team described empty streets with multiple buildings destroyed and others on fire. The road was littered with newly made craters and the city was covered in dust and shrapnel with the smell of gunpowder in the air.

Clouds of smoke rose across the skyline as Russian jets conducted multiple air strikes.

During the short time the team were on the ground, they witnessed nine air attacks.

Artillery, mortar and aerial bombardments hit more than 30 towns and villages, killing at least three people and injuring five others, said Kharkiv governor Oleh Syniehubov.

Ukraine rushed reinforcements to the Kharkiv region yesterday to hold off a Russian attempt to breach local defences, authorities said.

Ukrainian forces also launched a barrage of drones and missiles today, Russia’s Ministry of Defence said, with air defence systems downing 21 rockets and 16 drones over Russia’s Belgorod, Kursk and Volgograd regions.

One person died in a drone strike in the Belgorod region, and another in the Kursk region, local officials said.

Another strike set an oil depot on fire in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Luhansk region, killing four people and injuring eight more, said Leonid Pasechnik, the region’s Moscow-installed leader.

With reporting from AFP and Press Association.