Kyiv’s troops are mounting a counterattack as Russian invaders rain bombs and shells on villages in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, trying to stop a strong enemy offensive that already took over 100 square kilometers of the country’s territory.

The Ukrainian army is said to be facing off with an estimated 50,000 enemy troops in the eastern border with Russia as President Volodymyr Zelensky said they are trying to thwart Moscow’s attempt to expand the war.

Russia’s defense ministry is claiming the capture of border villages, including Lyptsi, and the town of Vovchansk.

“They are shelling the villages, firing everything they can,” Sergiy Kryvetchenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian military administration in Lyptsi, told Agence France-Presse.

Guided aerial bombs are falling “like rain,” said one serviceman, who was resting after fending off Russian assaults in Lyptsi.

Ukraine’s security council chief Oleksandr Lytvynenko said Moscow had mounted tens of thousands of troops against the Kharkiv region.

“There are a lot of Russians, quite a lot. About 50,000 were on the border. Now there are much more than 30,000 coming,” he told AFP.

Kharkiv regional governor Oleg Synegubov said Russia is “trying to deliberately stretch Ukrainian defenders, attacking in small groups in new directions.”

The General Staff said that in the Kharkiv region, Russia carried out 11 attacks on Monday and launched eight airstrikes.

It said Russia had “partial success” in capturing the village of Lukyantsi, but Ukraine halted its advance.

Synegubov said Russia had struck “more than 30” towns and villages.

On Monday evening, a missile hit Korotych, a settlement near the city of Kharkiv, killing a 38-year-old man and injuring three, police said.

Earlier attacks injured a 71-year-old woman in Lyptsi and a man, 69, in the town of Izyum, the governor said.

Ukraine’s army reported fighting in Vovchansk, where Russia was deploying “significant forces,” numbering up to five battalions.

In the southern Kherson region, two people were found dead after a strike hit a residential building, regional military administration chief Oleksandr Prokudin said.

Synegubov said 5,762 people had been evacuated so far since the start of the offensive.

“Today we plan to bring out around 1,600 local residents,” he added.

He also said it was necessary to move 113 children to safety from state children’s homes near the border.

New defense chief

The Russian offensive comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin removed veteran defense minister Sergei Shoigu and replaced him with an economist official, Andrei Belousov.

Regarded as Putin’s most trusted and influential advisers and widely seen as his point man on all things related to the domestic economy, Belousov has been tasked with deploying his number-crunching skills and bureaucratic oversight to secure Russian victory against Ukraine.

His move to the defense ministry signals a shift in the Kremlin’s understanding of the current state of the conflict and of how it can beat Ukraine: by outspending Kyiv and outlasting the West.

Meanwhile, Ukraine launched drone strikes on western Russia, a security source in Kyiv told AFP, hitting an oil terminal in the Belgorod border region and an electrical substation in the Lipetsk region.

Regional authorities in Russia’s Kursk border region said one woman was killed and three wounded when a drone struck several cars.