towards ukrainian territory as well, including thermal barrett rocket launchers. still heavy equipment here, yeah, we can see that rocket launcher now taking a turn as we ve noted in the past, moving towards the front line area towards kharkiv. and, of course, as we have been pointing out, john, we re not sure whether that s troop rotations, additional stuff being moved into that front line area, but that is certainly a very, very heavy and dangerous weapon that you re seeing being moved towards the city of kharkiv towards ukraine right now, john. even as talks go on. frederik pleitgen, remarkable sight to see that roll past you as you re speaking to us. please stay safe. we ll check back in with you in a bit. all right, we do have a military expert. let s bring in cnn military analyst, retired major general james spider marks. what did fred see rolling by there? it was a rocket launcher.
really heavy battle for kharkiv that s been going on and civilian areas being shelled with several people killed, we did see a lot of rocket artillery fire outgoing from where we are now clearly towards the area of kharkiv, and we also saw several massive multiple rocket launchers being moved from where we are towards the kharkiv area, towards the front line area, it s unclear whether or not those fires today on those areas, but certainly the russians bringing more fire power into that zone where the kharkiv battlefield is and also at the same time replenishing their forces as well. one thing we have to tell our viewers, from our vantage point here, close to the battlefield, the russians do have a lot of equipment stationed on this side, and certainly seem to have the capacity to escalate all of this if they feel they need to. of course a lot of people are saying that defensive in kharkiv seems to be going very difficult for the russian forces. they are running into problems, and we do
and what some sort of outcome of this could be. ukrainians are saying they aren t holding out much hope this could lead to a breakthrough. president zelenskyy of ukraine saying they need to try because, of course, right now the situation on the ground in so many places in ukraine is actually catastrophic. i want to show you one more thing if i may, john, if we have a second. there is a big rocket launching coming past us. i don t know if you have a military expert somewhere. i think that s a smirch multiple rocket launcher, i m not sure. that is certainly a weapon that can fire very hard and that is moving past us right now. again, as you ve noted, we are in that area very close to the front line. we re going to wait and see. they sometimes move them laterally along the front line, and sometimes move them to the front line area. but we have seen, john, in the past couple of days that we ve been here, some extremely heavy weaponry moving around this front line area. obviously some of th
russians are not making much progress in the battle and certainly increasingly using heavy weaponry that every once in a while certainly does land in civilian areas. and tell us about this awful, devastating strike. reporter: it is certainly an awful and devastating strike. one of the things we have to keep in mind about that area. it is in the northwest of kyiv and it is very close to the front line. only a couple of kilometers, maybe five miles from the actual front line area. while we were there, we did see a lot of shelling going on. outgoing and incoming shelling. you could see black smoke the entire time. we have heard from the russian defense ministry since then. they claim the ukrainians were hiring under a mall building. they said that the ukrainians were hiding ammo. in area as well so they claim this was a military target.
irpin is a front line area. it s just on the northern edge of kyiv. russian forces have been trying to take over this suburb area for the last two weeks and to use it as a beach head to launch a greater invasion into the capital. they currently control about half, roughly half. there s not one specific front line. so it s hard to know. there are pockets held by russian forces, other pockets held by ukrainian forces. but two weeks into this fight, they still have not been able to take over what is a relatively minor suburb, just over two weeks now. they are still being held back at irpin. we saw many ukrainian forces going in, many ukrainian volunteers. some were going in with weapons they bought themselves. volunteers were telling us they have been receiving donations including money and material from abroad, some from the united states, some from italy.