More than 3,000 civilians evacuated from eastern Ukraine in one week
More than 3,000 civilians have been evacuated from the fighting-torn Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine since authorities made such evacuations mandatory in late July, kyiv said on Tuesday.
“Over the past six days, 3,000 residents have been evacuated, including almost 600 children and 1,400 women. Mandatory evacuations continue”said on his Telegram channel Kirill Timoshenko, the deputy head of the presidential administration.
He said more than 1.3 million people had been evacuated from the area since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24 and that there were “maintaining a population of 350,000 people, including 50,000 children, in the territory of the region”.
kyiv has been pushing civilians to evacuate the area for months with mixed results, with many residents refusing to leave citing financial reasons or because they say they have nowhere to go.
At the end of July, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, announced that the decision had been taken to make the evacuation of the Donetsk region compulsory, particularly in anticipation of the winter, as the destruction of the gas distribution networks risked to deprive the dwellings of heating.
In the past 24 hours, three civilians have died and nineteen have been injured due to fighting in the region, the presidency also said on Tuesday.
After conquering almost all of the Luhansk region, the Russian forces concentrated their assault on the neighboring region of Donetsk, with a view in particular to taking Kramatorsk, the main city in the area still under Ukrainian control. The Russian advance, however, remains extremely slow.