Ahead of the announced Ukrainian counterattack against Russian forces, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk urged on Sunday residents in the southern region of Kherson to evacuate.
In her address via the Ukrainian national television, Vereshchuk warned of fighting and artillery shelling in the coming days, stressing that women and children definitely shouldn’t be there risking to become human shields.
The city of Kherson, located northwest of the Crimean Peninsula, had around 300,000 citizens before the war though it’s unclear how many residents remain in the Kherson region at the moment.
Russian troops captured the strategic city in the eastern Donbas – especially if Russia moves to capture the port city of Odesa – early in the invasion this spring, gaining in the meantime control of other key cities, including Sievierdonetsk and Lysychansk.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, after losing ground, vowed to reclaim control of all the territory Russia has captured.
Ukrainians have continued to fight to regain control of the city and Russian troops lost partial control of Kherson toward the end of May while being primarily focused on fights in the Donbas, the industrial heartland of the country located in the east while the war in Ukraine is approaching its fifth month.
Meanwhile, after a Russian rocket attack destroyed three buildings in a residential quarter of the town of Chasiv Yar, a town of about 12,000 in eastern Ukraine, late Saturday, dozens of Ukrainian emergency workers labored Sunday to pull people out of the rubble.
The Uragan rockets – fired from truck-borne systems – smashed into apartment buildings inhabited mostly by people who work in nearby factories, killing at least 15 people, while more than 20 people, including a 9-year-old child, were believed still trapped under the rubble.
Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai warned Saturday that Russian forces are raising true hell in the Donbas despite assessments Moscow was making an operational pause.
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