Russia Evacuates Civilians in Kherson As Ukraine Threatens Early Win for Putin’s Forces

• Russian forces are rushing to evacuate tens of thousands of people in the key city of Kherson.
• The move comes as Ukrainian forces advance toward the city — the first that Russia captured.
• Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive has been making steady progress over the last few weeks. 

Russia is trying to rapidly evacuate tens of thousands of civilians across the river in Kherson as Ukrainian forces continue their advance toward the strategic southern city. 

Local authorities in the Russian-occupied city were working frantically on Wednesday to move up to 60,000 civilians away from the right bank — or western side — of the Dnipro river, to its left bank — or eastern side.

Boats were commissioned to transport people across the water and ferry service was being sped up, Russian state media reported.  

The rushed evacuations appear to signal an expectation of intense urban warfare in one of the few major cities that Russian forces managed to capture throughout the eight-month-long war. The city, which was home to roughly 300,000 people before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion in February, was the first to fall to Russian troops back in early March. 

—ISW (@TheStudyofWar) October 19, 2022

Russian forces have been occupying this southern city since they captured it early in the war. But as they execute a counteroffensive along the war’s southern front, Ukrainian forces in recent weeks have gradually captured territory in the wider region and are pushing toward Kherson — causing concern among Russian military officials.

Speaking Tuesday on the situation unfolding around Kherson, Sergey Surovikin, a Russian general tasked this month with commanding Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine, said that Russian “plans in the city of Kherson will depend on the tactical military situation that is already very uneasy.”

“We will seek to protect the lives of civilians and our service members,” he said, adding that “We will act in a timely manner, without excluding the most difficult decisions.”

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank that has closely followed war developments in Ukraine, said in a Tuesday analysis said that occupation authorities are “attempting to incentivize” Ukrainian citizens to flee not just to southern Kherson but also to Russia as Ukrainian troops advance. ISW added that they “may increasingly force Ukrainian civilians to relocate in the coming days.”

The analysis added that Russian military officials have claimed Ukrainian forces are preparing an assault on the city and said the evacuation is precautionary. 

As evacuations were underway, Ukrainian officials ripped into Moscow on social media for its inability to hold onto the city and criticized the moves as a preemptive sham. 

“Less than a month has passed since the pompous announcement of Kherson annexation and solemn concert on the Red Square,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said. He mocked the self-proclaimed local leadership in Kherson as it “ceremoniously evacuates in anticipation of [Ukrainian] justice,” adding that “reality can hurt if you live in a fictional fantasy world.”

Andriy Yermak, head of Ukraine’s presidential office, called the evacuations a “propaganda show.”

Ukrainian forces “do not fire at Ukrainian cities — this is done exclusively by Russian terrorists, in which even in Russia planes fall on residential buildings,” he said, referring to a an incident this week in which a Russian Su-34 crashed into an apartment complex, killing 13.

Ukraine has made Kherson a priority, and its forces continue to retake captured territory. Kherson’s fall to Kyiv’s forces would be a notable defeat for Putin’s forces as they struggle to hold ground. Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive comes in tandem with one along the war’s eastern front. All together, Kyiv’s advances have seen it liberate thousands of square miles of territory over the last two months that were previously occupied by Russian forces.

To compensate for these growing military setbacks in Ukraine, Putin implemented a partial military mobilization and illegally annexed four Russian-occupied regions in eastern and southern Ukraine — Kherson being one of them. The move was widely condemned by Ukrainian officials and Western heads of state as a blatant violation of international law. On Wednesday, Putin even moved to declare martial law in the illegally annexed regions, a decree that appears to be largely symbolic.

Meanwhile, as Russian troops struggle on the front lines, Putin’s forces continue to launch missiles and Iranian-made suicide drones into Ukrainian cities far from the battlefield, exhausting a dwindling supply of long-range precision munitions for a terror campaign that war experts say will do little to move the needle in Russia’s favor.