Under pressure from the Ukrainian army’s continued offensive on the southern front of the war, the Russians yesterday began evacuating areas of the Kherson region, one of four Ukrainian regions recently theoretically annexed to the Russian Federation. According to the Russian-appointed governor of the region, Vladimir Saldo, the evacuation concerns four cities. Citizens leaving them settle in the Rostov, Stavropol and Krasnodar regions, and Moscow promises to provide them with free housing.

The decision to evacuate raised concerns in Russia, as it showed how vulnerable the city of Kherson itself, one of the largest cities captured by the Russian military since the beginning of the invasion and strategically important for the supply and defense of Crimea, is. Trying to soften the blow, Deputy Governor Kirill Stramusov said that the withdrawal of Russian troops was out of the question and that the need to relocate civilians was caused by Ukrainian shelling. Sergi Hlan, a spokesman for the elected regional council that ruled Kherson before the Russian occupation, stressed that the Russian-initiated evacuation represented a mass movement of Ukrainians against their will, with the exception of collaborators of the occupying army.

In his message on the occasion of the Day of the Defender of Ukraine, which Ukraine celebrated yesterday, President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed confidence that the armed forces of his country would defeat the occupiers, and said that Russian generals treat conscripts sent to the front like expendable material, like cannon meat. According to the Ukrainian authorities, thanks to the counter-offensive of the last two months, 502 settlements in the Kharkiv region, 75 in the Kherson region, 43 in the Donetsk region and seven in the Lugansk region have been liberated.

The Ukrainians are advancing on the southern front, ravaging the Russian conquests in the east.

At the same time, according to yesterday’s British intelligence, Russian troops are making painful gains in Donetsk and threatening the strategically important city of Bakhmut. Zelensky himself admitted that fierce battles are being waged for control of Bakhmut. In Moscow, the prosecutor’s office launched an investigation, accusing Ukrainians of killing civilians during the shelling of Belgorod.

one step back

From Astana, Kazakhstan, where he attended a regional conference of Asian countries, Vladimir Putin said there was no longer any reason for massive shelling of Ukrainian cities, such as last Monday, in retaliation for the sabotage of a bridge connecting Crimea with Russia. In addition, the Russian president said that the partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists would be completed in two weeks, and stressed that any direct clash between NATO troops and Russia would lead to a “global catastrophe.”