“Please take my words seriously - I’m talking about evacuating as quickly as possible,” he said on the Telegram messaging service.
“The civilian population is advised to leave the area of the forthcoming fierce hostilities, if possible, so as not to expose themselves to unnecessary risk,”
The Russian installed governor of Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, added that between 50,000 and 60,000 people would be evacuated to Russia and to the left bank of the Dnipro over the next six days.
AFP via Getty Images
Kherson, which was taken by Russia in the early weeks of the war, is the only regional capital in Ukraine to have fallen to Moscow’s forces since the conflict began and any defeat there would be another major blow to Vladimir Putin in the wake of other recent military reverses.
It is one of four partly or fully-occupied regions that Russia illegally annexed last month, in an effort - widely condemned and rejected by Western nations - to cement its land-grabs.
Proving incapable of holding all the territory it seized and struggling with manpower and equipment losses, Russia has stepped up bombardments from the air.
But General Sergei Surovikin, the commander of Russia’s forces in Ukraine, also admitted that Moscow’s troops are facing a “difficult” and “tense” situation.
“The enemy continually attempts to attack the positions of Russian troops,” he said. “As a whole the situation in the special military operation zone can be described as tense.”
He also admitted that Ukrainian forces were attacking elsewhere in other parts of the country, including on the Mykolaiv-Krivyi Rih front in the south and around Kupiansk and Lyman in the east.
General Sergei Surovikin
AP
News of the evacuation come as Russian missile strikes and shelling of energy utilities left more Ukrainian villages, towns and parts of two cities without power on Wednesday, authorities said, tightening an energy squeeze that threatens misery for millions in winter.
A nearly fortnight-long barrage of Russian attacks with missiles, self-destructing explosive drones and other weaponry on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure comes as Russian forces are being forced back on the ground.
The scorched-earth campaign targeting Ukrainian power plants and other key infrastructure contrasts with Kremlin tactics in the invasion's opening stage, when Russian commanders had seemingly sought to spare some utilities they perhaps thought they might later need, had they not been beaten back.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted Tuesday that nearly a third of Ukraine's power stations have been destroyed since October 10, causing "massive blackouts" nationwide.
Later on Tuesday, in his nightly video address, Zelensky urged Ukrainians to make "a very conscious" effort to save power, speaking before another night where substations and other infrastructure were pounded.
Zelensky said switching off appliances and doing other things to save power during hours of peak consumption help "the entire country."
