Kharkiv

Kharkiv is Ukraine's second city, home to roughly 1.4 million people before the 2022 invasion, sitting just 40 kilometres from the Russian border. That proximity has defined its ordeal since February 2022: it survived an encirclement attempt in the war's opening weeks and repelled a renewed ground assault in May 2024, but it cannot defend itself from the air. Shahed drones, guided aerial bombs and precision Cruise Missiles strike residential districts regularly.

Kharkiv's Soviet-era industrial base, including tank and defence manufacturing, makes it both a symbolic prize and a military target under Russian doctrine. On 7 March 2026 a Russian Izdeliye-30 cruise missile, Russia's newest jam-resistant weapon, collapsed a five-storey apartment building, killing ten residents including a teacher and her son. For those who remain, distance from the front offers no safety.

The Kharkiv direction became the proving ground for a new battlefield technology on 7 June 2026, when ISW reported the first sighting of North Korean Type-75 107mm MLRS mounted on Russian unmanned ground vehicles. It was the first combat integration of DPRK rocket artillery onto an autonomous platform: NRTK Kurier and Impulse robot vehicles ADD electric-drive aiming so the rockets can be laid remotely, removing crews from the firing line.

The sighting underlines how Pyongyang's materiel is now embedded in Russia's order of battle on Ukraine's northeastern axis, and how both sides are racing to push unmanned systems forward as manpower thins.

Kharkiv also saw a single day of anti-corruption protest on 16 July 2026, the opening day of a wave that ran three days in Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipro; crowds there and in Odesa did not return on the second or third day. The demonstrations followed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov's dismissal and targeted Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as much as Fedorov, with chants of 'Corruption kills' and 'Syrsky out'.