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Ukrainian authorities have warned residents near the eastern frontline to evacuate before the arrival of Russian troops, as Moscow presses ahead with its own offensive 10 days into Kyiv’s cross-border incursion.
While Ukrainian troops are attempting to gain more Russian territory in Kursk region, where they claim to control around 1,150 sq km, Russia has made steady gains in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
Serhiy Dobriak, head of the military administration in the city of Pokrovsk, said people should leave while there was time as the Russian forces had advanced within 10km of the city.
“Don’t delay!” Dobriak said on Telegram. “The enemy ruthlessly hits critical infrastructure and residential neighbourhoods.”
Russian-appointed authorities in the occupied regional capital, Donetsk, claimed that a Ukrainian missile targeted a shopping mall which was set ablaze on Friday. They said at least two people had died and 11 were injured.
The Financial Times could not independently verify the video posted on pro-Russian Telegram channels.
The Ukrainian armed forces declined to comment on the incident.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said on Thursday that Russian forces were “maintaining their relatively high offensive tempo in Donetsk region, demonstrating that the Russian military command continues to prioritise advances in eastern Ukraine”.
Moscow’s forces have made gains towards the cities of Pokrovsk and Toretsk and occupied parts of Niu York on Wednesday, according to Deepstate, a military analysis outlet with links to Ukraine’s defence ministry.
Some 60,000 people remained in the greater Pokrovsk region, the city administration told the Financial Times. They encouraged families with children in particular to evacuate ahead of any hostilities, “calmly and without panic”.
“We are not seeing a big flow of people leaving, but little by little we are noticing a trend,” said Kateryna Yanuzhla, head of press for Pokrovsk.
“Once the enemy is within 10km of Pokrovsk, children will be forcibly evacuated,” she said, referring to a decree Ukraine introduced last year that allows local police to evacuate children from active conflict zones even if their families refuse to leave.
Local administrations in towns under threat of occupation have long struggled to convince residents to evacuate. Some are afraid of leaving their homes and moving somewhere else, while others are bedridden or with mobility issues due to old age.
In the towns of Toretsk and neighbouring Niu York, parts of which are now occupied by Russian forces, there are still 3,500 residents who are mostly living in basements, according to Vasyl Chinchyk, head of the greater Toretsk administration.
He said that they were only managing to evacuate around 20 people a day because of mobile network problems, shelling, destroyed roads and Russian drones.
US officials said on Thursday that there were reports of Russia moving units from Ukraine to Kursk, but they have not said how many, from where, or which units.
Analysts say that one of the goals of Kyiv’s cross-border incursion that started on August 6 was to divert Russian troops from Donetsk, but it remains unclear to what extent that could be achieved. Ukraine rotated some of its most elite forces from the eastern front into Kursk, raising concerns about its ability to hold positions in Donetsk.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed to devote just as many resources and manpower to the eastern front as to the Kursk operation.
“We are not forgetting our eastern front for a second,” he said earlier this week.
Another goal of the Kursk operation is to extract a better deal in any future talks with Russia, with Ukrainian officials saying they are not interested in keeping the occupied territories beyond a “fair negotiation process”.
Additional reporting by Christopher Miller in Kyiv
Cartography by Aditi Bhandari
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