Ukraine Calls for Kherson Evacuation Amid Bakhmut Focus

Russia's expanding missile strikes on Kherson, Ukraine, have led to an evacuation call on the southern city as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is urging his military leaders to focus on defending the Bakhmut region in the east.

The Kherson city council has called for the evacuation as Russia fired 360 missiles Monday, which has put first responders under fire as they try to assist victims of the bombings, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Kherson, a city with a prewar population of 330,000, has been pummeled by Russia throughout the war, and officials are urging those remaining in the region to use evacuation routes out of the line of fire, according to the report.

"We've been recommending people leave from the day we liberated the city, because the front line is on the edge of Kherson, just 500 meters from the enemy, they have plenty of ways to reach civilians," Kherson Defense Command spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk told the Journal.

There remain just 50,000 residents of Kherson, according to Pletenchuk.

Zelenskyy's military is facing heavy fighting in Bakhmut, and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said a loss there "won't necessarily mean that the Russians have changed the tide of this fight.

"I think it's more of a symbolic value than it is strategic and operational value," Austin said Monday, according to the report.

The six-month battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut has been the longest and bloodiest fight of the war so far.

Bakhmut had a prewar population of more than 70,000, as an important center for salt and gypsum mining in the Donetsk region of the country's industrial heartland known as the Donbas.

Russian troops first attempted to recapture Bakhmut in early August but were pushed back.

The fighting abated in the following months as the Russian military faced Ukrainian counteroffensives in the east and the south, but it resumed at full pace late last year. In January, the Russians captured the salt-mining town of Soledar just a few miles north of Bakhmut and advanced to the city's suburbs.

The relentless Russian bombardment has reduced Bakhmut to a smoldering wasteland with few buildings still standing. Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have fought ferocious house-to-house battles in the ruins.

Soldiers from Russia's private Wagner Group contractor have spearheaded the offensive, marching on "the corpses of their own troops" as Ukrainian officials put it. By the end of February, the Russians approached the only highway leading out of the city and targeted it with artillery, forcing Ukrainian defenders to rely increasingly on country roads, which are hard to use before the ground dries.

For the Kremlin, capturing Bakhmut is essential for achieving its stated goal of taking control the entire Donetsk, one of the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed in September.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday that the seizure of Bakhmut would allow Russia to press its offensive deeper into the region.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the rogue millionaire who owns the Wagner Group, charged his forces were destroying the best Ukrainian units in Bakhmut to prevent them from launching attacks elsewhere.

At the same time, he harshly criticized the Russian Defense Ministry for failing to provide Wagner with ammunition in comments that reflected his longtime tensions with the top military brass and exposed problems that could slow down the Russian offensive.

And even as the Russian military tries to pursue its offensive in Donetsk, it needs to keep large contingents in other sections of the Donbas and in the southern Zaporizhzhia region where Ukrainian forces are widely expected to launch their next counteroffensive.

Information from Reuters was used in this report.

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