The new commander of Russian forces in Ukraine said the situation in the Kherson region has become “very difficult” as Ukrainian forces mount an offensive to retake southern and eastern parts of the country and that Moscow is preparing to evacuate civilians weeks after the annexation of the area. Sergei Surovikin, a Russian air force general appointed on October 10 to lead the invasion, said the situation in Kherson was “very difficult” for both civilians and Russian soldiers. “The Russian army will above all ensure the safe evacuation of the population” of Kherson, Surovikin told Rossiya 24 state television. “The enemy does not give up its efforts to attack the positions of the Russian troops,” he added. Russian forces in the region have been pushed back between 20 and 30 kilometers (13-20 miles) in recent weeks and risk being pinned down on the 2,200-kilometer (1,367-mile) west bank. ) Dnieper river that bisects Ukraine. Surovikin said Russian positions in the towns of Kupiansk and Lyman in eastern Ukraine and in the northern Kherson region between Mykolaiv and Kryvyi Rih are under constant attack. “The situation in the Special Military Operation area can be described as tense,” Surovikin told Rossiya 24, using Moscow’s official terminology for the February 24 invasion. [Al Jazeera] Kherson is one of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces that Russia claims to have annexed and arguably the most strategically important. It controls both the only land route to the Crimean peninsula that Russia seized in 2014 and the mouth of the Dnieper River. After holding referendums in September that Ukraine and its allies said were illegal and coercive, Putin declared the annexations of the eastern border provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk – together forming the industrial region known as Donbas – as well as Kherson and Zaporizhia in the south.
“There is no place for civilians”
Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Kherson region who is based in the Kremlin, said the authorities decided to evacuate some citizens because of the risk of an attack by the Ukrainian army. “The Ukrainian side is gathering forces for a large-scale attack,” Saldo said in a video statement. The Russian military was preparing to repel the attack, he said, and “where the military operates, there is no room for civilians. Let the Russian army do its duty.” Ukraine and Russia have denied targeting civilians, although Kyiv has accused Moscow’s forces of war crimes. Surovikin appeared to concede that there was a risk that Ukrainian forces would advance on the city of Kherson, which Russia captured largely without a fight in the first days of the invasion. Surovikin is nicknamed the “Armageddon general” in Russian media after serving in Syria and Chechnya, where his forces pounded cities to crush a brutal but effective scorched-earth policy against its enemies. His appointment quickly followed the largest wave of missile attacks against Ukraine since the start of the war. Those raids continued this week with Ukrainian officials saying they are being carried out with Iranian-made Shahed-136 “kamikaze drones,” which fly toward their target and explode. A Russian military truck drives past unexploded ordnance in the Russian-controlled village of Chornobaivka [File: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters] Iran denies supplying the drones, and on Tuesday the Kremlin also denied using them. “Russian technology is being used,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, referring other questions to the defense ministry. However, two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats told Reuters news agency that Tehran had promised to provide Russia with more drones as well as surface-to-surface missiles. Russia destroyed nearly a third of Ukraine’s power plants last week, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Speaking in his nightly video speech, he urged Ukrainians to reduce electricity consumption at night.
