The move, which includes broad travel restrictions including vehicle checks and “economic mobilization” across much of western and southern Russia, is the latest escalation by Putin as his military continues to concede ground in Ukraine. Demanding “the entire system of state administration” to contribute to the war effort, Putin on Wednesday authorized Russia’s governors to maintain public order, secure supplies for the armed forces and protect vital infrastructure. The measures, which are a step below martial law, cover eight regions bordering Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. Putin also created a “coordinating council” led by Russia’s cabinet to streamline support for the invasion forces. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said the council would focus on military equipment and supplies, as well as construction and transportation logistics. The renewed security measures come in response to Kiev’s continued successes in counter-offensives in occupied territories, including an advance on the southern city of Kherson, and rising tensions at home over Russia’s faltering invasion. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that “Russia has started a new stage of terror in the temporarily occupied territories” by imposing martial law. US President Joe Biden said Putin “is in an incredibly difficult position” in which the only tool he has left is to “barbarize” citizens and “intimidate them into capitulation – they’re not going to do that”. Putin’s attempt to raise the stakes last month by mobilizing army reserves, illegally annexing four occupied southern and eastern regions in a lavish Kremlin ceremony and threatening to use nuclear weapons to defend them has largely failed. Russia’s failures have drawn unusually harsh criticism of the Kremlin from pro-war hardliners, who have urged Putin to step up his offensive in Ukraine. In response, he appointed Sergei Surovikin, a notoriously ruthless general, to be in sole charge of Russia’s invasion forces and launched a series of airstrikes targeting critical infrastructure. The threat of martial law – a vaguely worded point in the decree allows Putin to enact “other measures” – raises the prospect that Russia could put the entire country on a war footing. Putin continues to insist that the war is a “special military operation,” a term that refers to distant conflicts that allowed most Russians to go about their lives as normal until the mobilization. However, Russia’s martial law provisions allow Moscow to introduce tighter controls on transport and vital infrastructure, bans on all public gatherings, full wartime censorship, “additional responsibilities” for citizens, broad economic restrictions and more restrictions on movement — up to a possible exit ban for Russian citizens. The Kremlin and regional officials have tried to play down the importance of the heightened security measures in Russia. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said there would be no border closures, while the governors of several border regions claimed nothing would change for locals under the decree. Putin said de facto martial law already existed in the occupied Ukrainian territories. The Ukrainian army has been slowly advancing on the city of Kherson since last month in a counter-offensive aimed at forcing a Russian retreat across the Dnipro River.

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In comments seen as setting the stage for a possible surrender of Kherson, the only provincial capital Russia captured in the war, Surovikin said he would need to make “tough decisions” to secure control of the wider southern region. Occupation authorities in Kherson said they had begun evacuating residents from the west bank of the Dnipro River as their Kremlin-appointed leader warned of an imminent attack from Kyiv. On Wednesday, Russian state television broadcast video of what it claimed was a long line of residents preparing to board ferries to take them to the eastern banks of the Dnipro, a part of the Kherson region more tightly controlled by Russian forces. But claims of an evacuation and an imminent attack were part of a Russian disinformation campaign to lay the groundwork for an armed provocation that Moscow will blame on Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities said on Wednesday.

Serhiy Kuzan, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry, said the evacuation announcement amounted to “forcible deportation of civilians who have been taken hostage and are being exploited” and that warnings of Ukrainian strikes were part of an “information campaign”. “They are setting the narrative before a planned provocation, in which they will blame Ukraine for shelling the city of Kherson or civilians,” Kuzan told the Financial Times. “This is a cover-up operation for what they plan to do. This means that something will happen for which they will blame Ukraine.”