While President Vladimir Putin was announcing martial law in four illegally annexed regions of Ukraine, Russia was launching a mass evacuation of civilians from one of the areas as its military signaled it might not be able to hold on much longer.
Moscow-appointed officials expressed fears that a battle for the strategically crucial city of Kherson in Ukraine’s south may be imminent after weeks of pressure from Kyiv’s troops to recapture territory Russia seized in the early days of the war and annexed illegally just last month.
Putin announced he was imposing martial law in Kherson and the three other annexed areas at a meeting of his Security Council on Wednesday. The move will give local officials more power over the occupied populace, but it’s unclear what impact that will have as battlefield setbacks and rare domestic criticism fuel growing Western concerns about the potential for further escalation.
The new commander of Russian forces in Ukraine said Tuesday that his troops in the country’s south were facing “a rather difficult” situation after a Ukrainian counteroffensive pushed them back and threatened their supply lines.
“Our further plans and actions regarding the city of Kherson itself will depend on the emerging military tactical situation,” Gen. Sergei Surovikin said. “Difficult decisions could not be ruled out,” he added in a rare interview with Russian state television not long after he was installed by the Kremlin.
The rare admission follows weeks of harsh criticism of Moscow’s military leadership by the country’s vocal pro-war faction, accusing officials of humiliating failures they then sought to cover up with domestic propaganda. The hard-line critics cheered the appointment of Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armageddon” for his brutality, and the subsequent wave of attacks on infrastructure and civilian targets across Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s hawks welcomed the sobering public assessment as a marked departure from its approach to what it still calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Russian-installed officials in the region then announced the evacuation of as many as 60,000 civilians from the right bank of the Dnieper river — where Ukrainians have made recent advances — farther south or into Russia.
Voluntary evacuations in the region were first announced last week, but the new statements carried a sudden urgency.
“The Ukrainian side is building up forces for a large-scale offensive,” the head of the Moscow-appointed regional administration, Vladimir Saldo, said Tuesday in a message on the Telegram messaging app, urging his fellow residents to leave as, he said, Russian forces were erecting defenses.
His deputy, Kirill Stremousov, was more direct, saying in a separate message on Telegram, “In the very near future, the battle for Kherson will begin.” No one is planning to surrender the city, he added as he urged residents to take the warnings seriously and not get “in the way” of the Russian military as it digs in.