Amid Russia’s sustained advance in the east, Ukraine has ordered the mandatory evacuation of border towns in the Donetsk region. Since launching a surprise offensive in the Kharkiv region in the northeast in May, Russia has claimed to have captured more than a dozen villages. When the Russian forces began the offensive, they had already been making gains in the region for months.
The Donetsk provincial government said children and their guardians are being evacuated from border towns, according to AFP. A total of 744 children and their families had to be relocated, said Donetsk Governor Vadym Filashkin. Donetsk, along with Luhansk, forms the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. It is in this region that much of the fighting has been going on for more than two years now.
While Russia intended to capture Ukraine in the initial weeks of the invasion, it reoriented the focus and moved to the east where it has since been consistently slicing off Ukrainian territory. Russia has illegally annexed four regions of eastern Ukraine: Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. Even though Russia does not control these regions in entirety and fighting is going on in these regions at several places, Russia now officially recognizes them as its part.
“The enemy is bombing the towns and villages of these communities every day, so it was decided to evacuate children with their parents or other legal representatives,” said Filashkin to AFP. Filashkin cited the town of Novogrodovka for the purpose of evacuation, which is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the village of Novoselivka Persha that Russia claimed to have captured on Sunday, according to the agency.
Filashkin further said, “I have instructed that only armored vehicles be involved in the process of evacuating children, as the enemy is actively using first person view drones in these communities…We must make every effort to protect our children.”
Even though Ukraine defended the territories well in the first year of the war and mounted an impressive counter-offensive that freed large swathes of territories, the second and third years of the war and subsequent counter-offensives have not been successful. While Ukraine has been successful in the Black Sea where it has damaged up to a third of the Russian fleet and has started striking deep inside Russia, it has also lost dozens of villages and some key towns in eastern Ukraine over the past year.
