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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Saturday that he would order residents of the Donetsk region in the eastern part of the country to evacuate amid heavy fighting in the war with Russia.
The president said, “The more people who quit, the more [the] If we leave the Donetsk region now, the Russian army will have less time to kill,” he said, adding that those who left would be compensated.
In his speech, Zelensky said that the hundreds of thousands of people still occupying the combat zones in the Donbass region should also leave. Donbass includes Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“Many people refuse to leave, but we still need to do it,” he said. Please, persuade me that I need to leave.”
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According to Ukrainian media, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said the region needed to be evacuated before winter because natural gas supplies had been cut off.
However, former US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst said the evacuation may have more to do with anticipation of more intense fighting, rather than fuel shortages.
“I don’t know why Zelensky called,” he said. “What I do know is that there was heavy fighting in Donetsk. The Russians [neighboring] Luhansk [oblast] a few weeks ago. We look forward to another hard-fought battle in Donetsk.”
The Ukrainian military on Saturday claimed more than 100 Russian soldiers were killed and seven tanks destroyed during fighting in the Kherson area on Friday. The Kherson area is the center of Kyiv’s counteroffensive in the south and an important part of Moscow’s supply lines.
Ukraine claims over 100 Russian soldiers killed in fighting in Kherson region
The southern Ukrainian command said rail traffic across the Dnipro to Kherson could be cut off, further isolating Russian forces west of the river from delivering supplies to Crimea and the east.
A long-range missile system supplied by the West has been used by Ukraine to damage three bridges across the Dnipro River in recent weeks, Kherson region.
“As a result of the establishment of fire control over the main transport links of the occupied territories, the impossibility of traffic on the railway bridge across the Dnipro River was established,” the Southern Ukraine Command said in a statement. rice field.
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Kherson Region Governor Dmitro Butryi said the Belislav district across the river northwest of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant was particularly affected.
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“In some villages not a single house is left intact, all infrastructure has been destroyed and people are living in basements,” he wrote in Telegram.
Butriy said fighting continued in many areas of the Kherson region.
Reuters contributed to this report.