Leave now, pro-Russia officials tell residents of city in Ukraine

Pro-Russian authorities have urged residents in the southern Kherson region, which Moscow claims to have annexed, to leave the main city “immediately” in the face of Kyiv’s advancing counter-offensive.It comes as President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had launched 36 rockets overnight in a “massive attack” on Ukraine, following reported strikes on energy infrastructure that resulted in power outages across the country.Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida meanwhile became the latest world leader to reproach Moscow for its talk of using nuclear weapons.Kyiv’s forces have been advancing along the west bank of the Dnipro river, towards the Kherson region’s eponymous main city.Kherson was the first major city to fall to Moscow’s troops, and retaking it would be a major prize in Ukraine’s counter-offensive.In recent days, Russia has been moving residents in the region – which Moscow claims to have annexed in September – east to Russia, in efforts Kyiv has denounced as “deportations”.“Due to the tense situation on the front, the increased danger of mass shelling of the city and the threat of terrorist attacks, all civilians must immediately leave the city and cross to the left bank” of the Dnipro river, the region’s pro-Russian authorities announced on social media.A Moscow-installed official in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov, told Russian news agency Interfax yesterday that around 25,000 people had made the crossing.Sergiy Khlan, the Ukrainian deputy head of the Kherson region, said Russians were removing property and documents from banks and the passport office as they withdrew.Ukraine’s general staff said Moscow’s forces had abandoned two more settlements in Kherson and were evacuating medical personnel from a third, accusing them of looting local civilians.Earlier, Japan’s Kishida denounced Moscow’s comments regarding the possible use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict.“Russia’s act of threatening the use of nuclear weapons is a serious threat to the peace and security of the international community and absolutely unacceptable,” he said.The 77-year period of no nuclear weapons use “must not be ended”, said Kishida, speaking in Australia.Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Putin has made several thinly veiled threats about his willingness to deploy tactical nuclear weapons.Earlier this month, the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned that the Russian army would be “annihilated” if Russia launched such an attack.Washington has also warned Moscow of “catastrophic” consequences should they use such weapons.Japan is the only country ever to have been hit with nuclear weapons: the US atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which killed 140,000 people, and the second US bomb on Nagasaki, three days later, which killed 74,000 people.At a train station in the town of Dzhankoy in the north of Crimea, a peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014, Kherson residents were boarding a train for southern Russia, an AFP reporter saw on Friday.“We are leaving Kherson because heavy shelling started there, we are afraid for our lives,” said Valentina Yelkina, a pensioner travelling with her daughter.More than 1mn households in Ukraine have been left without electricity following Russian strikes on energy facilities across the country, the deputy head of the Ukrainian presidency Kyrylo Tymoshenko said yesterday.Fresh Russian strikes targeted energy infrastructure in Ukraine’s west, the national operator said earlier, with officials in several regions of the war-scarred country reporting power outages as winter approaches.Russians “carried out another missile attack on energy facilities of the main networks of Ukraine’s western regions”, Ukraine’s energy operator Ukrenergo said on social media.“These are vile strikes on critical objects,” said Zelensky. “The world can and must stop this terror.”Parts of Kyiv suffered power cuts stretching into the early evening.In one central area of the capital, shops were closed and traffic lights were off, leaving motorists to navigate busy junctions by themselves.Reuters witnesses in the southern city of Mykolaiv reported a power cut lasting several hours, disrupting mobile phone signals on some networks.In the southeastern city of Nikopol, which is regularly shelled from Russian positions across the Dnipro river, local authorities warned that air raid sirens would be switched off as a result of power cuts, and that instead emergency vehicles driving around the city would warn of incoming aerial threats.Power outages were reported in other parts of the country and local officials repeated calls to reduce energy use.Some parts of Ukraine have already cut their electricity use by up to 20%, according to Ukrenergo.