KARKIV REGION, Ukraine — For the past 10 weeks, a battle has raged for a small border town just five miles (8 kilometers) from Russia.

The fact that Russia invaded Vovchansk was not a surprise. Russian troops had been massing along the border with northeastern Ukraine, while the undermanned and overstretched Ukrainian forces waited for military aid from the US and Western allies.

For Oleksii Charkovskyi, head of the city’s patrol police, it felt like a real-life example of what can happen when there isn’t enough help.

“We tried to prepare ourselves,” he says. “But the Russians came in and dropped so many bombs.”

Kharkivskyi grew up in Vovchansk, where he fished in forest ponds and walked along the Vovcha River that bisected the city. He helped evacuate his neighbors through those forests when Russian troops occupied Vovchansk in February 2022. A few months later, Ukraine retook the city, but only a quarter of its 18,000 residents returned. They were shelled daily by the Russians.

“We, as police, were there to try to give people the confidence to stay,” Kharkivskyi said. “I got to know everyone personally.”

When the Russians invaded again in early May, he saw himself evacuating his neighbors, mostly elderly people who were crying as they left everything behind. He filmed the evacuations and posted the videos on Facebook.

“I wanted to show everyone what it looks like when a city no longer has the ability to defend itself,” he said.

Serhii Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a defense think tank in Kiev, said delays in military aid from the US and Europe were encouraging Russia to massively deploy troops along Ukraine’s northeastern border with Russia.

He said the offensive began to stall only after aid started trickling in and the US gave Ukraine permission to use US-supplied weapons to attack a limited number of military targets in Russia.

“Ukrainian intelligence warned of Russian plans in the northeast,” Kuzan said. “The lack of ammunition and the lack of resources led to a loss of valuable time.”

Less armed at the front

Deep in the woods, not far from Vovchansk, the command center of one of the battalions of the 57th Motorized Brigade has set up a temporary base.

Battalion commander Yurii Lunyov said that at the beginning of the offensive, supply lines to the front line were blocked by Russian fighter jets that were constantly dropping guided bombs in and around the city. These bombs have retractable wings and satellite navigation.

A soldier from the brigade, Rodion, who did not want to give his last name for security reasons, was monitoring a screen showing Russian and Ukrainian soldiers fighting on the streets of Vovchansk in late May.

“We ration ammunition,” he said. “But the Russians have the means to drop countless bombs, even on very small targets, like three soldiers.”

The guided bombs remain a challenge But Lunyov, the battalion commander, said the Russians appeared to slow down after the U.S. allowed Ukraine to use American-issued weapons to strike military targets in Russia. Those strikes, he said, “appeared to have damaged logistics chains and equipment in Russia.”

However, Russia continues to send waves and waves of infantry, and the brigade’s artillery unit tries to hold them back.

Deeper in the forest, along a dirt road, the unit’s commander, Nur, who asked not to give his full name for the same security reasons, said the unit did not have long-range grenades.

“If we had had these,” he said, “we could have fired on the Russian troops before they reached Vovchansk.”

No more time

Some Western military aid has now arrived at the front, helping Ukrainian troops to halt the Russian advance here. But there is little left of the city other than ruins and rubble.

Dozens of people remain in Vovchansk, hiding in basements as Russian forces continue to attack the city. Earlier this month, soldiers and local police evacuated three children.

Evacuations are dangerous. In late May, hundreds mourned a police officer killed by a Russian drone during an evacuation. The memorial was held in a basement about 30 miles from Vovchansk, in the city of Kharkiv. Air raid sirens blared outside.

The wartime administrator of Vovchansk, Tamaz Gambarshvili, walked behind the coffin with a limp.

“The enemy attacked a place where we had set up an evacuation headquarters,” he said. “I received a shrapnel wound in my left thigh.”

Gambarshvili is responsible for relocating evacuees from Vovchansk, many of whom ended up in a student house that is now empty because of the war.

Liudmyla Kuznetsova, a 79-year-old retired accountant from a bread factory, said she and her family were among the last to leave Vovchansk.

“When the doors and windows of our house were blown off, we just fixed them,” she said.

But she had run out of supplies and Vovchansk had run out of time.

She left at night with only the clothes on her back, while her hometown was on fire.

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