Russia wants buffer zone in Kharkiv with no plans to capture city: Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region aims to create a buffer zone but has no plans to capture the city, as Ukraine will allow prisoners to join the army's depleted ranks and approved a fivefold increase in fines for draft dodgers.

Putin’s comments on Friday during a trip to China were his first on the offensive launched on May 10, which opened a new front in the war and displaced thousands of Ukrainians within a few days.

It came hours after a massive Ukrainian drone attack on the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula early Friday caused power cutoffs in the city of Sevastopol after an earlier attack damaged aircraft and fuel storage at an airbase.

In southern Russia, Russian authorities said the attack on Friday also set a refinery ablaze.

Moscow launched attacks in the Kharkiv region in response to Ukrainian shelling of Russia’s Belgorod region, Putin told reporters Friday on a visit to Harbin, China.

"I have said publicly that if it continues, we will be forced to create a security zone, a sanitary zone," he said. “That's what we are doing."

Putin said that Russian troops were “advancing daily according to plan" and that, for now, there were no plans to capture Kharkiv.

Ukrainian troops were fighting Friday to halt Russian advances in the Kharkiv region that began late last week.

Meanwhile, a Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed to The Associated Press that Ukraine’s Security Service and Military Intelligence conducted a joint operation to strike Russia’s military infrastructure sites in Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea coast, and occupied Sevastopol.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorised to comment publicly.

The operation targeted ships and vessels of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and was conducted by aerial drones built in Ukraine, the official said.

Ukraine 'preparing for defence'

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted refineries and other energy facilities deep inside Russia, causing significant damage.

Earlier Ukrainian attacks damaged aircraft and a fuel storage facility at Belbek air base near Sevastopol, according to satellite images released by Maxar Technologies.

Recent Russian offensive attacks, on the other hand, have occurred in the eastern Donetsk region, the Chernihiv and Sumy regions in the north, and the southern Zaporizhzhia region. The apparent aim is to stretch depleted Ukrainian resources and exploit weaknesses.

Having strengthened their grouping in the northern region, Russian forces are now concentrating their efforts to advance near the village of Lyptsi, as well as the town of Vovchansk, according to Syrskyi, the Ukrainian military commander.

Syrskyi also said he inspected the units “preparing for defence” of the Sumy region. On Tuesday, Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence, reportedly said that the Russian army had plans to start offensive actions in Sumy.

Russia has also been testing defences at other points along the roughly 1,000-kilometre front line, which snakes from north to south through eastern Ukraine. That line has barely changed over the past 18 months in what has become a war of attrition.