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Russian forces have launched an attack on Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region as Moscow aims to take advantage of its superior weaponry and manpower before the arrival of more US military aid.

Kyiv’s defence ministry said Russian armoured units attempted to break through Ukrainian defensive lines early on Friday after conducting artillery and air strikes around Vovchansk, a town 70km north-east of Kharkiv city.

“As of now, these attacks have been repelled; battles of varying intensity continue,” the ministry said on the social media platform X. “Reserve units have been deployed to strengthen the defence in this area. The Defense Forces of Ukraine continue to hold back the enemy’s offensive.”

Commenting on the Russian attack, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “Ukraine met them there with our troops, brigades and artillery. It is important that they can increase and pull up more forces in this direction, but our military, our command knew about this and calculated their forces to meet the enemy with fire. Now there is a fierce battle in this direction.”

Oleh Syniehubov, governor of Kharkiv region, said “unsuccessful attempts by sabotage and reconnaissance groups to break through the line” followed a nightlong bombardment of the area with artillery and glide bombs.

Footage geolocated by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War shows Russian forces made small tactical gains on Friday, capturing the village of Pylna in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region. Russia also appears to have made further, though incremental, gains to the south, west and east of Pylna, occupying around 35sqm of territory. 

However Ukraine said it had pushed back Russian forces. Synehubov said that Russia had not captured a single village on Friday and “heavy fighting” continued in the villages of Pylna, Strilecha and Borysivska, which he described as a “grey zone”.

Ukrainian officials and western analysts have anticipated for some weeks that Russian forces could launch an offensive across the border into the Kharkiv or Sumy regions of Ukraine. Until now, Russia has concentrated its offensives in the eastern Donetsk region, particularly around the strategically important town of Chasiv Yar.

John Kirby, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council, told reporters Russia was likely to increase the “intensity” of its operations near Kharkiv, in an attempt to create a “shallow buffer zone” along the Ukrainian border with Russia.

While Moscow had some advantages because of the lapse in US funding for Ukraine earlier in the year, he said he did not expect it to make any “breakthroughs” now that US military aid was flowing again, and predicted Ukraine would “withstand” Russian attacks this year.

A Ukrainian military official told the Financial Times on Wednesday that Russia was preparing for offensives along the north-eastern frontline in order to draw Ukrainian forces away from Donetsk where, heavily outgunned and outmanned, they are struggling to hold their defensive lines. Parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, collectively known as the Donbas, have been occupied since 2014.

Major General Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence service, told The Economist last week that Russia had 35,000 troops from its northern grouping based across the border from Kharkiv and was looking to increase the number to up to 50,000. He said this would not be sufficient to seize Kharkiv but could enable Moscow to conduct a “quick operation to come in and out”.

Analysts said a Russian offensive of this kind would be either intended to create a buffer zone along the border or as a “fixing operation” intended to force Ukraine to divert forces from its main defensive effort in the Donbas region.

Frontelligence, an analytical group run by a former Ukrainian officer, said Russian forces had crossed the border near the Ukrainian village of Strilecha, west of Vovchansk, and had seized a number of settlements nearby.

“It’s an anticipated manoeuvre to divert Ukrainian resources from the main Russian offensive in Donbas. Considering manpower shortages, Ukraine will be forced to redeploy some personnel,” the group posted on X.

Russian forces would likely “deploy more units to penetrate additional border areas or to reinforce initial successes” but had not yet breached Ukraine’s main line of defence, which sits further back from the frontier, it added.

Russian is likely trying to exploit the lag between US Congressional approval of $61bn of aid for Ukraine last month and US weaponry and ammunition reaching the front lines.

There have also been delays in European supplies. Czech President Petr Pavel earlier this week said an emergency consignment of artillery munitions crowd-funded by EU countries was now due to arrive in Ukraine in June. Czech-led procurement efforts had been delayed by Russian “countermeasures”, he told Germany’s ARD television.

Ukraine is also due to expand its mobilisation efforts to raise more soldiers for its armed forces, with new laws coming into effect later this month.

WASHINGTON – Rudy Giuliani was suspended from WABC radio on Friday over discussing false claims about the 2020 presidential election on his daily talk show, which was also canceled.

John Catsimatidis, a billionaire Republican businessman, told the New York Times, which first reported the firing, that Giuliani was given several warnings before he made the decision to terminate him from the radio station.

“We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it,” Castimatidis told the New York Times.

“He left me no option. I suspended him,” Castimatidis said. 

Giluliani served as former President Donald Trump’s former campaign lawyer. Giuliani, one of the former president’s top allies, has repeatedly espoused false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. A federal jury ordered him in December to pay $148 million in damages to a pair of Georgia election workers for defaming them. Giuliani declared bankruptcy not long after the decision and is currently seeking to appeal the ruling.

Giuliani, also a former mayor of New York City, is additionally currently facing criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“John Catsimatidis and (WABC radio) fired me for refusing to comply with their overly broad directive,” Giuliani said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, pushing back against his firing, calling it “a clear violation of free speech.”

Among the topics that Giuliani was barred from discussing on his show, according to a letter obtained by NBC News sent on Thursday, included, “but are not limited to, the legitimacy of the election results, allegations of fraud effectuated by election workers, and your personal lawsuits relating to those allegations.”

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China’s consumer inflation edged higher in April while factory prices continued to slide, pointing to a continued rocky recovery in the world’s second-largest economy as Beijing battles lagging consumer demand and global trade tensions.

The national consumer price index rose 0.3 per cent year on year in April, official statistics showed on Saturday, ticking up from an 0.1 per cent rise in March, with price increases in areas including energy, education and tourism offsetting falling food costs. 

China’s economy had been beset by flat or falling consumer prices for almost a year, with the country’s 1.4bn consumers widely opting to save instead of spend in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But a third straight month of consumer inflation in April suggested some stabilisation of domestic demand despite a years long crisis in the important real estate market.

The inflation reading — better than the 0.2 per cent predicted by economists surveyed by Bloomberg — came as President Xi Jinping leans on a manufacturing revival, particularly in high-tech industries, to boost economic growth and offset the property sector slowdown.

The strategy has stoked growing fears among western leaders of cheap Chinese imports flooding their markets, especially as declining prices in the country’s manufacturing sector make Chinese goods cheaper. 

The data from the National Bureau of Statistics on Saturday showed prices in China’s industrial sector in April remained mired in negative territory. The producer price index declined by 2.5 per cent on a year earlier last month, after declining 2.8 per cent in March and 2.7 per cent in February.

Analysts said prices in the all-important manufacturing sector may be a better barometer of the true health of the economy.

“Chinese manufacturers have volume but they don’t have prices,” said Chen Long of Plenum, a Beijing-based research firm. 

“GDP growth in real terms looks pretty decent, but then if you look at nominal GDP growth and corporate profits — they produce a lot, but they don’t make a lot of money because prices are falling,” he added. 

Profits at Chinese companies listed on domestic exchanges were down 5 per cent year on year in the first quarter, excluding the financial industry, he noted.

Data released on Thursday showed the value of China’s exports in dollar terms rose 1.5 per cent year on year in April, but analysts said export growth in volume terms has been closer to 10 per cent or higher in recent months. The trend is driving renewed tensions with China’s most important trading partners, including the EU and the US. 

French leader Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen earlier this week warned Xi on a visit to the continent that the EU needed to protect itself from cheap Chinese imports. In the US, the Biden administration is planning to raise tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and other green energy imports next week. 

In response, Xi has brushed off western leaders’ concerns. He told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last month that China’s exports were helping to ease global inflation, and this week told European leaders that China did not have an overcapacity problem.