Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk has announced plans to evacuate people who want to leave the recently liberated southern city of Kherson and its surrounding areas. According to him, the reason is due to damage to infrastructure by Russian forces that had made life extremely difficult for residents.
News of the evacuation came as Russian missiles were reported to have struck an oil depot in Kherson on Saturday evening, officials said, and the first time a fuel storage facility had been hit in the city since Russia withdrew more than a week ago.
Vereshchuk said on Saturday that a number of people had expressed a wish to move away from Kherson and the area around Mykolaiv, about 65 km (40 miles) to the northwest.
“This is possible in the next few days,” she told a televised news conference in Mykolaiv when asked when the evacuations from Kherson would begin.
Vereshchuck said the government had already made the necessary preparations for the evacuation. Among those who wanted to leave were the elderly and those who had been affected by Russian shelling, she said.
“This is only a voluntary evacuation. Currently, we are not talking about forced evacuation,” Vereshchuk said.
“But even in the case of voluntary evacuation, the state bears responsibility for transportation. People must be taken to the place where they will spend the winter,” she said.
She added that the government had several evacuation options, one of which was to use Mykolaiv as a transit point before sending people further west into safer areas of the country.
In August, Vereshchuk said Ukraine planned to expand the number of front-line districts where civilian evacuations would be mandatory, as those areas could be occupied and would also face problems with heating during the Ukrainian winter months.
Two missiles hit a fuel depot on Saturday in Kherson, firefighters at the scene told the Associated Press news organization.
Anton Gerashchenko, a government adviser and a former deputy minister at Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, posted a short video on Twitter apparently showing thick smoke billowing after powerful explosions were reported in Kherson on Saturday.
