Military authorities in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk have urged civilians to flee as the Russian Army reportedly advanced on the city whose capture would compromise Ukraine’s defensive abilities.
Reports on the Russia-Ukraine war, which enters its day 906 on Friday, August 16, 2024, indicate that Military authorities urged civilians to speed up their evacuation because the Russian army was quickly closing in on what has been one of Moscow’s key targets for several months.
Pokrovsk officials said in a Telegram post that Russian troops were “advancing at a fast pace. With every passing day, there is less and less time to collect personal belongings and leave for safer regions.”
Pokrovsk is one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds and a key logistics hub in the eastern Donetsk region. Its capture would compromise Ukraine’s defensive abilities and supply routes and bring Russia closer than ever to its stated aim of capturing the whole region.
Meanwhile, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy disclosed on Friday that Ukraine’s lightning offensive into several Russian border regions is designed to persuade Moscow to engage in “fair” talks about its war in Ukraine.
“We need to inflict significant tactical defeats on Russia,” the Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Telegram.
“In the Kursk region, we clearly see how the military tool is objectively used to convince the Russian Federation to enter into a fair negotiation process”, he said
Also on Friday, Ukraine’s Army Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said that Kyiv’s forces were advancing between one and three kilometres in some areas in Russia’s Kursk region.
This is as the Ukraine Military authorities further confirmed that it has taken control of 82 settlements over an area of 1,150 sq km (444 sq miles) in the region after it launched a major cross-border attack on 6 August.
Briefing President Volodymyr Zelenskiy via video link, Syrskyi reported fighting in the area of Malaya Loknya, some 11.5km from the Ukrainian border.
It appeared that Ukraine had largely cut off a significant area of Glushovsky district of Kursk and Russian troops there after blowing up two important bridges on the Seim river.
A mass evacuation is under way in the Glushkov district, home to 20,000 people, and the destruction of one bridge had hindered their evacuation, the Russian news agency Tass reported. – With The Guardian report
