Russia’s men in Kherson city tell civilians to flee

New commander of Russian forces makes rare acknowledgment of pressures they are under from Ukrainian offensives to retake southern and eastern areas

Russia’s men in Kherson city tell civilians to flee

Street musicians play in a square without electric lights in Kyiv Tuesday. Pic/AP

Russian-installed officials in the occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson said on Wednesday they were preparing to defend it from imminent Ukrainian attack and urged civilians to flee as soon as possible.

The Russian-appointed governor of the region, Vladimir Saldo, said in a TV interview, “No one is about to surrender Kherson but it’s undesirable for residents to be in a city where military actions are going to be conducted.” “We expect an attack, and the Ukrainian side doesn’t hide that,” Saldo said. His deputy Kirill Stremousov said a Ukrainian offensive was coming soon. “I ask you to take my words seriously and take them to mean: the fastest possible evacuation,” he said in a late night post on Telegram.

Kherson is one of four Ukrainian regions that Russia partly controls and whose annexation it proclaimed last month, placing them under its nuclear umbrella. The Russian-installed leader of the annexed Ukrainian region of Kherson said on Wednesday that authorities plan to evacuate around 50,000-60,000 people over the next six days. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that he was declaring martial law in the four regions of Ukraine that Russia has proclaimed as annexed — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

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The new commander of Russian forces in Ukraine made a rare acknowledgment of the pressures they were under from Ukrainian offensives to retake southern and eastern areas that Moscow says it annexed just weeks ago.

“The situation in the area of the ‘Special Military Operation’ can be described as tense,” Sergei Surovikin, the Russian air force general now commanding Russia’s invasion forces, told the state-owned Rossiya 24 news channel. On Kherson, Surovikin said, “The situation in this area is difficult. The enemy is deliberately striking infrastructure and residential buildings.” Russian forces in the Kherson region have been driven back by 20-30 km (13-20 miles) in the last few weeks and are at risk of being pinned against the western bank of the 2,200-km-long Dnipro river that bisects Ukraine.

Discussion on Iranian drones

European Union governments have provisionally agreed to impose sanctions on eight people and entities over the use of Iranian-made drones in Russian strikes on Ukraine, three diplomats said. Ukraine has reported a spate of Russian attacks using Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks. Iran denies supplying drones to Russia, while the Kremlin has not commented.

10k
No of people Russia wants to evacuate every day

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