Ukraine war: Russia braces for battle in occupied Kherson as martial law is declared
Russia is preparing for all-out battle in a southern Ukraine region after Vladimir Putin declared martial law and evacuations began.
Russia was preparing for all-out battle in southern Ukraine on Thursday after President Vladimir Putin declared martial law in Kherson, along with three other illegally annexed regions in the east, and began evacuating the Russian-installed local administration and civilians.
Mr Putin’s declaration signalled a desperate attempt to tighten the Kremlin’s authority over the occupied areas of Ukraine.
Russia has admitted its grip is crumbling in Kherson city, the only regional capital its forces have seized since the invasion eight months ago.
The decree, which gives Russian authorities greater powers to confiscate property, limit movement and compel civilians to work for the war effort, also extends a security clampdown to southern and western Russia, with some measures applying in Moscow.
Russia’s proxy civilian administration in Kherson said it would evacuate 10,000 civilians to the other side of the Dnipro river for each of the next six days, having begun shifting its own officials by ferry on Wednesday.
The movement began a day after General Sergei Surovikin, the commander of Russian troops in Ukraine, acknowledged that the situation in Kherson was “difficult”. He accused Kyiv of planning to destroy a dam upriver of Kherson city, implying that the evacuation was intended to save civilians from disaster.
In Kherson, Kirill Stremousov, a senior Russian-installed leader, warned that Ukrainian forces would launch an assault on the city “in the very near future”.
He urged civilians to leave while insisting Russian forces would stand and fight. Leaflets were distributed urging residents to “save your family” and indicating the routes east they should take.
Ukraine said the evacuation order was a stunt to scare civilians into moving further east into Russian-controlled territory.
Kyiv says that Moscow has moved 2.5 million people to Ukrainian territory under Kremlin control or to Russia since the invasion began. The forcible transfer of civilians by an occupying power is a war crime and is under preliminary investigation by the International Criminal Court.
Russia has been slowly but steadily losing ground in Kherson on the western side of the river, even as a Ukrainian offensive swept through the country’s northeast, reclaiming a swath of territory all the way to the Russian border.
Russian state television showed people boarding a ferry to cross the river from Kherson, whose bridges were disabled in an earlier Ukrainian offensive. Satellite imagery revealed that Moscow had finished building a new barge bridge across the river on Tuesday, for potential use in an evacuation or military resupply.
Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Russian-occupied Melitopol, warned that Kherson’s civilians were facing deportation so that Russia could take over their homes and populate the city with “soldiers and traitors”, referring to Ukrainians who have collaborated with the occupation force.
Andrii Yermak, the head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, called the martial law order a “pseudo-legislation of looting of Ukrainian property”.
Several residents of Kherson reached by phone on Wednesday said they had no plans to leave. “We will not be relocated by Russia,” one told The Times.
“We will stay and welcome our army.”
Another said the bulk of those leaving on Wednesday were involved in or supportive of the Russian administration. About 100,000 civilians are believed to have remained in Kherson out of a pre-war population of 320,000.
President Joe Biden also denounced the latest Russian moves. “I think that Vladimir Putin finds himself in an incredibly difficult position. And what it reflects to me is, it seems the only tool available to him is to brutalise individual citizens in Ukraine … to try to intimidate them into capitulating. They’re not going to do that.”
Moscow has been changing its military strategy to target Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and devastate its power grid before winter, when battlefields become all but immobilised by mud. Attacks by missiles and drones have denied Ukraine the use of almost a third of its power facilities since October 8.
The change of strategy, which followed the Crimea bridge attack and the appointment of Surovikin to command troops in Ukraine, has been seen as an admission of battlefield weakness. Russian forces are on the offensive only on the Donbas front, the Russian-speaking region declared by Mr Putin as the priority for the invasion after March’s failed assault on Kyiv.
The Times
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