(Tribune News Service) — The Ukrainian military said it’s planning to seize back territory in the northeast after claiming that Russia’s offensive north of Kharkiv has stalled.

“The enemy has been stopped,” Ihor Prokhorenko, an official in Ukraine’s General Staff, said during a briefing in Kyiv Friday. Russia has failed in its effort to create a buffer zone of up to 30 kilometers (19 miles) within Ukraine.

Russia is accumulating troops along the border in the neighboring Sumy region, Prokhorenko said. Defenses have been boosted there, and the military will avoid “miscalculations” that allowed Russians to pour into the Kharkiv region earlier this month, he said.

Russia’s fresh offensive near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, has bogged down in street fighting in the towns near the border two weeks after its start, top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said Thursday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with officials in Kharkiv on Friday to discuss preparations for the new heating season as well as the military situation in the region, according to a statement on his Telegram channel.

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