International Glance
The two Russian soldiers jogged across an apocalyptic landscape. They kept going, zigzagging over a vegetable patch. At the intersection between Hoholia and Travnia streets, the pair disappeared into a roofless brick building. Around them was the ruined town of Vovchansk. It was a smouldering hell of blackened blocks of flats and shell-dinted cottages.
Vovchansk, once home to about 17,000 people, is approximately three miles (5km) from the border with Russia in north-east Ukraine.
Russian troops seized it on the first day of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale February 2022 invasion. They retreated six months later, going back up the road to the Russian city of Belgorod. A month ago – on 10 May – they swept in again, taking over Vovchansk’s polyclinic and meat processing factory.
A brutal battle has raged ever since. Russian forces control the north of the city and a grid of shattered western districts. Ukrainian troops hold the centre. Their fiefdom includes half of Korelenka Street, with the Russians concealed in nearby basements. Fighting takes place house by house. Vovchansk now resembles a 21st-century mini Stalingrad, a place of death, rattling gunfire and close-quarters combat.
The Israeli military made improper use of a U.S.-made bomb in a deadly airstrike Thursday on a United Nations school compound in Gaza, according to current and former U.S. defense officials who analyzed an image of the bomb remnants documented by NPR at the site.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday he could deploy conventional missiles within striking distance of the United States and its European allies if they allowed Ukraine to strike deeper into Russia with long-range Western weapons.
