The population was fleeing on Wednesday the advance of Russian troops towards Pokrovsk, an important logistical hub in eastern Ukraine, which they continue to approach despite kyiv’s offensive in the Russian border region of Kursk.
The Russian army has taken village after village in recent weeks in this sector of the front and is now about ten kilometers from Pokrovsk, a town of some 53,000 inhabitants that the Ukrainian authorities have called for urgent evacuation.
Met by AFP journalists during his escape from the region, Maksym, 40, describes a “very tense” situation that is getting worse by the hour. His eight-story building was recently hit by a strike while he was walking home.
“I decided to leave because life is more important,” says the miner who digs galleries in a mine in Pokrovsk.
Anatoli, 60, said he witnessed two bombings. “What a waste! But everyone is alive, thank God. People have left,” he said.
Regional authorities on Monday ordered the “forced evacuation” of families with children from Pokrovsk, a town on a road leading to the Ukrainian strongholds of Chassiv Yar and Kostiantynivka.
Kursk, Pokrovsk, New York
In a new sign of its advance, the Russian army claimed on Wednesday the conquest of a new village in this sector, that of Jelanné, located around twenty kilometers east of Pokrovsk.
On Tuesday, it announced that it had captured the city of New York in eastern Ukraine, a highly symbolic victory given its name.
But this locality is also presented by Russia as an important logistical platform for Ukrainian troops, in the Toretsk agglomeration.
However, Ukrainian military officials and bloggers assured on Wednesday that part of New York remained under the control of kyiv’s forces.
While the Ukrainian military offensive launched on August 6 in the Russian region of Kursk has received much attention because it brings hostilities to the attacker’s soil, the epicenter of the fighting remains in the Ukrainian industrial region of Donbass (east), where Russian soldiers have the advantage, being better equipped and more numerous.
In the Kursk region, the Ukrainian military announced Tuesday evening that it had taken control of 1,263 square kilometers and 93 localities, slightly more than the day before. Their largest claim so far is the small town of Sudja, with a population of 5,500, located eight kilometers from the border with Ukraine.
“The Ukrainian armed forces have advanced 28-35 km into the enemy’s defenses,” their commander Oleksandr Syrsky said.
According to Ukrainian authorities, the operation is intended to create a “buffer zone” in Russian territory to ward off bombing, force Moscow to redeploy forces there from other sectors of the front, or serve as a bargaining chip during possible “fair” peace talks.
The Ukrainian offensive on the Kursk region does not seem to have reduced Russian pressure on Pokrovsk.
Cross drone attacks
The Russian capital was targeted during the night by “one of the most significant” Ukrainian drone attacks of the war, according to its mayor Sergei Sobyanin.
Eleven Ukrainian drones were shot down, he said. The city of Moscow, located more than 500 km from the Ukrainian border, had been targeted by drones several times in the past, without them ever causing significant damage.
On the Ukrainian side, the air force claimed to have destroyed 50 Russian drones and a missile during the night. The head of the military administration in kyiv, Sergiy Popko, said that 10 of them had been intercepted while they were “heading towards the Ukrainian capital.”
Russian telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor also reported on Wednesday a brief but rare outage of the messaging services Telegram and WhatsApp in Russia due to a “DDoS” (denial of service) attack, which involves bringing down a system by overwhelming it with requests.
Finally, Ukraine voted on Wednesday to join the International Criminal Court (ICC), after years of procrastination and despite opposition from the military, in the hope of one day seeing Russia punished for the crimes attributed to it.
The issue is, however, very sensitive in Ukraine, with many fearing that its forces fighting the Russian army could in turn be targeted by the ICC, whose mission is to prosecute the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression.
The day before, the Ukrainian parliament had voted to ban the Russian-linked branch of the Orthodox Church, which, although losing influence, still has thousands of parishes in Ukraine.