Moscow has announced it will evacuate Kherson after an appeal from the Russian-installed head of the region, raising fears the occupied city at the heart of the south Ukrainian oblast will become a new frontline.
Marat Khusnullin, a Russian deputy prime minister, told state television on Thursday that residents would be helped to move away from the region in south Ukraine, which remains only partly occupied by invading troops due to a successful Ukrainian counterattack in recent months.
“The government took the decision to organise assistance for the departure of residents of the [Kherson] region to other regions of the country,” Khusnullin said.
The development followed a public request on the social media platform Telegram by Vladimir Saldo, a former mayor of the port city, who was installed in April by the Russian forces as head of the wider Kherson region.
Saldo, who Ukrainian prosecutors have charged with treason, had specifically called on Vladimir Putin to help those who wished to flee the fighting, claiming it was Ukrainian attacks imperilling the lives of locals.
Saldo, who was mayor of Kherson city between 2002 and 2012, said: “I want to ask you [the Russian leadership] for help in organising such work. We, residents of the Kherson region, certainly know that Russia does not abandon its own, and Russia always lends a shoulder where it is difficult.”
Officials in Kyiv have spoken of their hopes of reaching the regional capital of Kherson by Christmas despite Putin’s recent announcement that the oblast had been “annexed” into Russia alongside Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk, a move condemned around the world as illegal.
In New York, three-quarters of the 193-member UN general assembly – 143 countries – voted on Wednesday in favour of a resolution condemning Russia’s “attempted illegal annexation” of the four partially occupied regions.
Only four countries joined Russia in voting against the resolution: Syria, Nicaragua, North Korea and Belarus. Thirty-five countries abstained from the vote, including Russia’s strategic partner China, while the rest did not vote.
The city of Kherson was one of the first to fall to Russia after the invasion on 24 February and is a crucial strategic and symbolic target for Ukraine’s government. Ukrainian forces said on Wednesday they had successfully retaken five settlements in the north-east of the Kherson region as part of the counterattack launched in August. The fighting remains hard, however.
British intelligence said that after retreating about 12 miles in the north of Kherson in early October, Russian forces were probably attempting to consolidate a new frontline west of the village of Mylove which lies further north-east up the Dnieper River from Kherson city.
Overnight, the city of Mykolaiv, 60 miles north-west of Kherson city, was once again pummelled by Russian missiles, with one strike on a five-storey apartment block killing a 31-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman. Five further people were said to still be under rubble.
The Mykolaiv regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, said an 11-year-old boy was pulled from the rubble after six hours and rescue teams were searching for seven more people.
Ukrainian officials said on Thursday that Iranians in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine were training Russians in how to use the Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone, which can conduct air-to-surface attacks, electronic warfare and targeting. Their deployment may indicate the Russian military is running out of its own drones.
Ukraine’s air force command said air defence shot down six Iranian drones from over the Odesa and Mykolaiv regions during the night.
Meanwhile, claims from Moscow that Ukraine had hit a residential building in the southern Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukrainian border were denied in Kyiv.
Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior Ukrainian presidential adviser, claimed Russian forces had tried to shell Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, on the border “but something went wrong”.
With Russia struggling to relaunch its war effort, the issue of whether the Kremlin could react by using nuclear weapons in Ukraine brought a strong response in Brussels.
At the opening of a diplomacy academy in Brussels, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, warned Putin of his army’s “annihilation”, despite the French president, Emmanuel Macron, saying on Wednesday that his country would not use its nuclear arsenal in such circumstances.
Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, said: “Putin is saying he is not bluffing. Well, he cannot afford bluffing, and it has to be clear that the people supporting Ukraine and the European Union and the member states, and the United States and Nato are not bluffing either. Any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer, not a nuclear answer but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian army will be annihilated.”
