MOSCOW, November 14. /TASS/. Kherson Mayor Alexander Kobets on Monday said the city’s newly arrived officials are performing checks on "the so-called undesirable people," some of whom work at critical infrastructure facilities.

"The authorities that entered the city of Kherson are most zealous now about checking the so-called undesirable people. <…> Of course, people that worked at critical infrastructure facilities are treated as complete traitors," he said on the Rossiya-24 television.

The city mayor said that the new authorities aren’t letting anyone into the city because of ongoing reprisals. He said the "undesirables" are also hunted down after dark, during curfew, when houses are dark and lights are off.

"Our calculations show about 40,000-50,000 thousand [people] have stayed in the city," Kobets said.

On November 9, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu ordered a pullback of Russian forces from the western bank of the Dnieper, where Kherson is located, agreeing to a proposal by Sergey Surovikin, commander of the integrated group of forces in the special military operation zone.

Surovikin stressed that Russian forces had been successfully repelling Ukrainian attacks, and the decision to pull back was due to the risk that the group could be isolated if the area below the Kakhovskaya HPP dam is flooded. According to the commander, all civilians who agreed to evacuate, or more than 115,000 people, had been relocated to the eastern bank.