The Ukrainian President met with senior military commanders in Kharkiv on Thursday. Ukraine's second biggest city is under a renewed Russian offensive, with Russia making its biggest territorial gains in 18 months. President Zelenskyy says Ukrainian units in the northeast are being reinforced. While the regional governor says Russian advances have been stopped in parts as Ukraine works to stabilize the Northern front line. Some of the most intense battles have been around the small town of Oschansk, about 60 kilometers from Kharkiv. Still, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, US General Christopher Cavoli, believes Ukrainian defenses will hold.

No, the Russians don't have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrough. We don't believe More to the point, they don't have the skill and the capability to do it, to operate at the scale necessary to exploit any breakthrough to strategic advantage.

Cnn's nick Payton Walsh reports firsthand, civilians as well as soldiers are now under fire from drones and artillery fire, and now they're just simply trying to find their way out.

When nightmares recur, they're often the same. Here, they get worse. The border town of Vowchansk bearing the blunt horror of Moscow's race to take as much as they can in the weeks before Ukraine starts feeling American military help again. Every street a flame. Russians deeper inside the town. Policeman, Maxim, is answering one of 35 calls from locals on Thursday to evacuate. The day before, three colleagues were injured. The shelling never stops. Three people still coming out. You have to imagine quite how disparate. For these final people, the situation must be to leave. Mekola and his wife hiding in their basement. But despite staying through the first Russian occupation and then liberation two years ago, they found the airstrikes last night. It just too much. They're joined by Maria, their mother, who can't hear the shelling or anything too well. Thousands evacuated since Russia invaded again around here five days ago. Why everyone has to leave is clear again as we drive out, as it is with almost every part of Ukraine Russia coverage. Just utter destruction. Little left to rule over. This is their first moment of calm in many days. Entire lives in plastic bags.

Saying it wasn't like last night was scary and everyone else was talking about significant bombardment, more that it was just better to get out of there. Eighty. An armored ride to a new world, knowing they may never get back to their homes, tormented for days by shelling..

We head back in with another police unit who soon learn two of the houses they must rescue from are impossible to reach.

As we wait, they hear a buzzing noise. They think they can hear a drone here. It's so hard to tell with the wind the trees and the artillery, but that's a constant threat for them now. Then our security adviser spots it. They raise their weapons, but will firing make them more of a target? Three drones, one large one that hovers and two small ones whizzing about. Exposed, powerless. If we run for cover, they might come for us. All we can do is hide in the trees and hope that if we're seen, the Russians instead have a better target in mind. But they come right overhead. That noise.

In the car and move, they say.

Either the sound of death or someone deciding you're not worth their payload. We decide to leave. But again, we cannot travel fast enough to escape the drones. Only expose ourselves and pray they lose interest. Perhaps they did. We'll never know. But behind us, Ukraine is aflame again. Because however the West's in interest in this war wanes, Putin's burns brighter than ever. Nick Payton Walsh, CNN, Vovchansk, Ukraine.

With us this hour from Canberra, Australia, is Malcolm Davis, the Senior Analyst of Defense Strategy and Capability at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It's good to see you, Malcolm. It's been a while.

Thank you very much, John.

Just very quickly off the top, the problem for Ukraine is that to defend the north, they're now taking soldiers and forces from the south, and the Russians are now exploiting those weaknesses.

Exactly. I think that the risk is that whilst the general is right, they don't have the ability or the capabilities to break through in the north. They do have the ability to force the Ukrainians to redeploy from the south to the north and from the east to the north, weakening those aspects of Ukraine's front line. Essentially, that could then allow the Russians to make further advances in the east and the south. So yes, no strategic breakthrough per se at this point in time, but lots of potential tactical breakthroughs.

Much of the destruction around Khakiv is being caused by Russian glide bombs, which are modified old Soviet-era dumb bombs, which The Economist reports last year, the Russians started adding simple, cheap conversion kits. When wings that pop out when the bomb is released, a satellite guidance system. There's now a slightly more sophisticated and accurate version which has the wings integrated into the body of the weapon, laser guidance, and an anti-jamming antenna. These bombs can carry a 1,500-pound payload. They're called building destroyers, and they're precise to a point, and they're not expensive. Right now, Ukrainian air defenses are incapable of stopping them. What can they do here?

Well, I think the simple solution is, firstly, to build up the air defenses. That has to be a priority for military aid going into Ukraine to stop the glide bombs. Secondly, I think that the US, in providing those air defenses, need to essentially remove any constraints on shooting Russian aircraft inside Russian airspace, because what the Russians are doing is launching these glide bombs from inside Russian airspace to attack targets in Ukraine. So they have a sanctuary there, which they're able to operate from with relatively of invulnerability. If you take away that invulnerability and start shooting down Russian aircraft inside Russian airspace, the glide bomb threat goes away.

This has been a pattern all along, that the West, and in particular, the White House, is forcing forcing Ukraine to fight with one arm tied behind their back. And time is running out because there's a very real likelihood that come November, there'll be a different President in the White House. There'll be no more military aid for Ukraine. They have about what, 170-something days to make some significant gains here, and it doesn't look like it's going to happen.

It is a worry in the sense that that $60 billion aid package was passed through Congress and signed by President Biden. But the aid itself is still moving very slowly, both in terms of ammunition for the ground forces and the air defense capabilities. So I do think that there needs to be an acceleration of the aid. Secondly, the Biden administration, in particular, needs to, as I said, remove the shackles and allow the Ukrainians to start striking deep inside Russia with US-supplied weapons, including attackums. They also need to provide those F-16s, which would make a huge difference in terms of denying the Russians the ability to strike inside Ukraine. So all in all, the aid needs It needs to move faster. It needs to reach the Ukrainians much more quickly. The Biden administration needs to remove any constraints and basically allow the Ukrainians to strike deep and strike fast.

We heard the assessment from NATO that with Western military assistance, slowly making it way to the front lines, that Ukraine should be able to hold those defensive positions, especially considering the Russian reinforcements which are being sent by Moscow. Listen to this.

If you look at the quality of the troops, they have a big problem still in making sure that the new troops are trained to a level that is actually better than the troops that were originally available. So they have now more troops, but the quality of the troops is lower than the troops they started the conflict with.

This is a war of attrition. Who cares about the quality of the Russian troops in their training? They're just cannon for it at the end of the day, aren't they?

Correct. And Putin doesn't care about how many Russians die in this conflict. I think the real risk here is that as the military aid continues to trickle into Ukraine, they might get enough to hold the line. But at the end of the year, we could get a change in administration in Washington, DC, that then sees any military aid to Ukraine in 2025 shut down completely. And then the Russians can bring their military industrial capacity and their superior numbers to bear, and they can start to, once again, make advances. So I think that what we're seeing is essentially Putin recognizing that the United States, in particular, but also Europe, is fearful of escalation. Putin rattles his nuclear savers on a regular basis, and that inspires a degree of fear and unwillingness on the part of the Biden administration to allow Ukraine to strike back hard. But secondly, we lack time. We need to get that aid moving much more quickly so that Ukraine can start to make real headway, because I really do worry that come 2025, you're going to see a new administration in the White House, and that's the end of any US assistance to Ukraine.

Malcolm, thanks for being with us. One point I would just make before we go is that the only thing which guarantees an escalation by Moscow is not standing up to Putin. We've seen that year after year after year from Georgia to Kubaida, to this full-scale invasion. So we'll see what happens. Malcolm.

Exactly.

Thank you. Thank you, sir.