Summer is just starting in Ukraine, and it is looking dangerous.
Kharkiv, the country’s second city, in the high north-east close to Russia, is to all intents and purposes defenceless against air attacks.
Two guided bombs destroyed a DIY superstore and garden centre on Saturday afternoon when it was crowded with shoppers.
As the building burned, sending black smoke across Kharkiv, Andrii Kudenov, manager of one of the other stores in the shopping centre looked on in despair.
“The Russians want to burn everything down. But we won’t give up.”
“A lot of people were in there as it’s warm now and the gardening season has begun. In the shop there was soil, and plants.”
Andrii took out his mobile and scrolled through photos of the superstore before the attack.
“Look what beautiful flowers they had here. And not a single military man, everyone was a civilian.”
Dozens were injured and at least 15 people were confirmed killed, with more bodies left to find.
In every war, civilians try to preserve traces of their old lives.
As the garden centre burned, couples walked their dogs. In the magnificent squares in the centre of Kharkiv, cafés were open, ignoring air raid sirens and alerts on mobile apps.
On the steps of the opera house teenage boys practised jumps on their skateboards and girls were recording TikTok dances on their phones. Inside the opera house, in a deep concrete basement, an orchestra was rehearsing for the music festival that the war has not stopped.
Their stoic composure cannot conceal the fact that Ukraine is in its worst crisis since the first few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion more than two years ago.
The garden centre attack was one of many strikes here in the north east, as well as on the eastern front, and south near Kherson.
Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself depends on others, on decisions taken by its Western allies that are shaping events here in Kharkiv and other cities, and right along more than 1,000km (621 miles) of front line.
The other strategic factor that is changing the course of the war is Russia’s ability to learn and adapt on the battlefield.
It is configuring attacks to take advantage of Ukrainian weakness, especially in air defences. Its factories are producing more weapons and ammunition than much bigger and more advanced Western economies are doing for Ukraine.
Hopes in the first year of fighting that Russia could be driven back have turned into a grim struggle to stop its forces advancing deeper into the country.
In the war’s third year, no end is in sight.
The end of the beginning?
Russian President Vladimir Putin expected a quick victory when he ordered the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
So did Nato, led by the United States. President Volodymyr Zelensky turned down their offer of evacuation.
Both the Kremlin and the Pentagon and the other Nato defence ministries expected that Russia would finish the job it started in 2014, when it occupied and annexed the Crimean Peninsula and orchestrated a victory by separatists in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Ukraine’s armed forces had improved on a dismal showing in 2014, but after a successful intervention in the war in Syria, Russia just looked too strong.
The prediction as Russian troops poured into Ukraine in February 2022 was that Ukraine’s best chance to keep fighting would be to organise an insurgency, armed by Nato.
Russia captured a deep stretch of Ukrainian territory, a “land-bridge” to link Donbas in the east with Crimea in the south.
But its attempt to seize Kyiv was a humiliating fiasco for President Putin.
By the end of March 2022, the battle for the capital was lost and the Kremlin pulled its troops back.
Nato recognised that Ukraine could fight. It revealed itself as an unexpectedly useful ally, worthy of more support, providing a welcome set of new options in the growing face-off with Putin’s Russia.
Slowly, Ukraine was sent increasingly powerful weapons. Overcoming US President Joe Biden’s reservations remains a painful process. He feared a third world war if the US and Nato intervened with their own troops, or even if they supplied Ukraine with its most up-to-date military technology.
President Biden was persuaded to allow the supply of elderly American-built F-16 strike aircraft that were being retired by Nato air forces. They have not yet been deployed in combat, allowing Russia’s air force more space to attack.
Most Western analysts think President Putin is bluffing when he rattles the nuclear sabre.
China, Russia’s essential ally, has made it clear it does not want any use of nuclear weapons. The last thing it needs is a nuclear arms race in East Asia.
In the Western camp, Japan and South Korea, if they felt threatened enough to change their policies, both have the technological capacity to make nuclear weapons.
Joe Biden still does not want to call Vladimir Putin’s bluff.
The US continues to impose limits on the use of weapons systems it supplies, forbidding the Ukrainians to hit targets inside Russia.
President Zelensky believes that ruling ties one arm firmly behind their backs and is pushing to get it changed.
