I have very little news today. The Kharkiv area: Lots of artillery fire. Ukraine used artillery combined with helicopters to attack Kozacha Lopan, Tsupivka, and Velyki Prokhody. Russians tried to attack Dementiivka and were repelled (1).
Russians claim they destroyed a Ukrainian recon element that pushed out of Dementiivka (2). They claim to have killed 5 and captured 10.
The Kharkiv area: Today Russia launch missile attacks into Kharkiv, in addition to launching MLRS and tube artillery into the city and most of the surrounding areas. Russians have been targeting both civilians (mostly) and military targets.
Russians are trying to push in the direction of Svitlychne (1), but they are getting hammered by Ukrainian artillery along the way. They are also trying to dislodge Ukraine from Dementiivka (2) but their attacks are routinely repelled.
The Kharkiv area: There was an abnormally large amount of Ukrainian artillery reported today around Kozacha Lopan and Sosnivka. I don't know if Ukraine fired more than usual, whether it was more effective than usual, or if Russians just happened to talked about it more.
Russians claim to be attacking towards Svitlychne (1), but I have not seen evidence that they have reached the town. And I found Russian complaints about heavy shelling today on their advance towards Svitlchne.
This is how the Russian advance is going. But before I get into that, on May 15th I traced the front line to make this tweet. I created a line to calculate the length of the front line.
Here is that front line, represented as a thick black line, on top of the current lines. The Izyum area. Ukraine has taken significant ground in the pine forest and they have pushed north into Velyka Komyshuvakha and towards Dibrovne and Sulyhivka.
Meanwhile, Russia has taken Lyman, Yarova, Sosnove, Svyatohirsk, and along with that entire bank of the river and they have pushed down to Mazanivka, Krasnopillya, Dolyna, and Bohorodychne.
If you would like to view the map, if you click on things there is some info attached. I am too lazy too add that much info, it is mostly dates. I probably should add more, though: google.com/maps/d/u/0/edi…
The Chernihiv and Sumy regions: Russia is more or less shelling all of the border towns with mortars and occasionally artillery and air strikes. Both helicopter and fixed wing.
The Kharkiv area: Lots of shelling across the front, ongoing skirmishes on all points of contact. Today Russia seemed to focus on attacking the Verkhnii Saltiv/Rubizhne area as they fired a bunch of artillery and called in air strikes.