Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) – Russian-backed authorities in Ukraine told all residents of the city of Kherson to leave “immediately” Saturday ahead of a planned advance by Ukrainian troops carrying out a counteroffensive to reclaim one of the first urban areas that Russia took after invading the country.
In a post on the Telegram messaging service, the pro-Kremlin regional administration asked civilians to use boat crossings on a major river to go deeper into Russian-controlled territory, citing a tense situation at the front and threat of bombings and alleged “terrorist attacks” from Kyiv.
Kherson has been in Russian hands since the early days of the nearly 8-month war in Ukraine. The city is the capital of a region of the same name, one of four that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last month and placed under Russian martial law on Thursday.
On Friday, Ukrainian forces shelled Russian positions across the province, targeting pro-Kremlin forces’ supply routes across the Dnieper River and moving closer to a full assault on the city of Kherson. Ukraine has retaken some villages in the region’s north since it launched its counteroffensive in late August.
Officials stationed in Russia were reported to be desperately trying to turn the city of Kherson, a prime target for both sides because of its key industries and ports, into a stronghold as they tried to relocate tens of thousands of residents.
The Kremlin poured up to 2,000 inmates into the surrounding region to recoup losses and bolster frontline units, according to the Ukrainian military’s general staff.
The Dnieper River figures prominently in the regional battle because it serves multiple critical functions. It provides passages for supplies, troops and civilians; drinking water for southern Ukraine and the annexed Crimean peninsula; and the generation of energy from a hydroelectric plant.
Much of the area, including the power station and a canal feeding Crimea, is under Russian control.
Kherson’s Kremlin-backed authorities previously announced plans to evacuate all Russian-appointed officials and up to 60,000 civilians across the river, in what local leader Volodymyr Saldo said would be an “organized and gradual displacement”.
Another official stationed in Russia estimated on Saturday that some 25,000 people from across the region had crossed the Dnieper. In a Telegram post, Kirill Stremousov claimed that civilians were being relocated willingly.
“People move actively because today the priority is life. We are not dragging anyone anywhere,” he said.
Ukrainian and Western officials have expressed concern about possible forced transfers of residents to Russia or Russian-occupied territory.
Ukrainian officials have urged residents of Kherson to resist attempts to relocate them, with one local official claiming Moscow wanted to take civilians hostage and use them as human shields.
Elsewhere in the invaded country, hundreds of thousands of people in central and western Ukraine woke up Saturday to power cuts and periodic bursts of gunfire. In its latest war tactic, Russia has stepped up strikes on power plants, water supply systems and other key infrastructure across the country.
Ukraine’s air force said in a statement on Saturday that Russia had launched “a massive missile attack” targeting “critical infrastructure”, adding that it had shot down 18 of 33 air-launched cruise missiles and sea
In a Telegram post published later Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy referred to 36 missiles, “most of which were shot down.” The reason for the discrepancy in the numbers was not immediately clear.
Air raid sirens sounded twice in Ukraine in the early afternoon, sending residents scrambling for shelters as Ukrainian air defenses scrambled to shoot down explosive drones and incoming missiles.
“Several rockets” aimed at the Ukrainian capital were shot down on Saturday morning, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging service.
The president’s office said in its morning update that five suicide drones were shot down in the central Cherkasy region, southeast of Kyiv.
The governors of six central and western provinces, as well as the southern Odesa region on the Black Sea, gave similar reports.
Ukraine’s top diplomat said the day’s attacks showed Ukraine needed new air defense systems reinforced by the West “without a minute’s delay”.
“Air defense saves lives,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, told Telegram that nearly 1.4 million homes lost electricity as a result of the strikes. He said some 672,000 homes in the western Khmelnytskyi region were affected and another 242,000 suffered outages in the Cherkasy region.
Most of the western city of Khmelnytskyi, which straddles the Bug River and had a pre-war population of 275,000, was left without power shortly after local media reported several explosions.
In a social media post on Saturday, the council urged residents to stockpile water “in case it’s also gone within an hour”.
The mayor of Lutsk, a city of 215,000 in Ukraine’s far west, made a similar call on Saturday. Electricity in Lutsk was partially cut after Russian missiles hit local power facilities, Mayor Ihor Polishchuk said.
He later added that a civilian suffered burns when the shock wave of the attack hit his house and that a power station had been damaged beyond repair.
The central city of Uman, a key pilgrimage center for Hasidic Jews with about 100,000 residents before the war, was also plunged into darkness after a rocket hit a nearby power plant, regional authorities told Telegram.
Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, Ukrenergo, responded to the strikes by announcing that shutdowns would be imposed in Kyiv and 10 regions of Ukraine to stabilize the situation.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, the company accused Russia of attacking “energy facilities in the main grids of the western regions of Ukraine.” He claimed the scale of the destruction was comparable to the aftermath earlier this month of Moscow’s first coordinated attack on Ukraine’s energy grid.
Both Ukrenergo and Kyiv officials have urged Ukrainians to conserve energy. Earlier this week, Zelenskyy asked consumers to curb their energy use between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. and to avoid using energy-guzzling appliances such as electric heaters.
Zelenskyy said earlier this week that 30 percent of Ukraine’s power plants have been destroyed since Russia launched the first wave of strikes targeting the infrastructure on October 10.
In another development, Russian officials said a shelling attack on a border town a few kilometers north of the border with Ukraine killed two people and wounded 12.
Andrey Ikonnikov, the health minister for Russia’s southern Belgorod region, said a 14-year-old boy and an elderly man died on the spot after shells hit civilian infrastructure in Shebekino, which is home to about 44,500 people
Earlier social media posts by the regional governor, Vladislav Gladkov, blamed the attack on Ukraine. Russia has previously accused Ukrainian forces of numerous attacks on civilians in the border regions of Belgorod and Kursk. Kyiv has not formally responded to these accusations.
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Kozlowska reported from London.
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