Heavy fighting is taking place in southern Ukraine along the borders of Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, according to Ukrainian authorities.
The Russians are shelling many areas of Nikolaev, the government said on Wednesday. For the second day in a row, the town of Bereznehuvate was shelled on Tuesday, according to regional authorities. The shelling in neighboring rural areas has ignited the harvest, they added.
The government said heavy fighting was taking place in several villages along the regional border.
In Kherson, which has been under Russian control since March, more activists, politicians and journalists have been reported abducted.
“There are no Ukrainian media in the region,” Ukrainian officials said.
“Occupiers and local collaborators are making louder and louder statements about the Kherson region’s accession to Russia,” the government said, but added that “more and more Ukrainian flags and inscriptions are appearing in the city (Kherson) every day.”
A bit of background: The extent of dissent and resistance in Kherson is difficult to assess, but there have been several attacks on Ukrainian officials who have chosen to cooperate with the Russians, as well as anti-occupation poster campaigns.
Earlier this week, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk called on civilians in the Kherson region to leave if they could.
She said they should travel through Russia’s annexed Crimea if necessary, adding that it was “almost the only” evacuation corridor available to those who want to escape.
The Russian occupation forces are finding it increasingly difficult for civilians to leave Kherson for Ukrainian-held territory.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that hundreds of Ukrainians have left Kherson via Crimea, taking buses via Turkey or Russia and Georgia on a long journey to reach parts of Ukraine that are not under Russian control.
“According to our estimates, up to 50% of the region’s population of half a million has already left Kherson and the Kherson region,” Hennadiy Lahuta, head of the Kherson regional military administration, said on Tuesday.
Routes to Krivoy Rog and Nikolaev, which the residents of the Kherson region used to evacuate before, “now do not work, the occupiers do not let people. “There are columns that are being released, but people are forced to spend weeks in the fields and we pass through the occupied Melitopol and Vasilivka to Zaporozhye,” he added.
More than 1,400 people have left the occupied territories in the past 24 hours, about 400 of whom came from the Kherson region and reached Zaporozhye, Alexander Starukh, head of the region’s military administration, said on Tuesday.
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