MOSCOW, July 25. /TASS/. Ukrainian troops don’t let civilians leave Kiev-controlled territories in the Kharkov region, with cases of physical violence being reported against people trying to flee, Vitaly Ganchev, chief of the Kharkov region military-civilian administration, said on Monday.

"It is deliberate killing of people. They (Ukrainian troops - TASS) don’t let people leave Kiev-controlled territories in the Kharkov region. All attempts to leave the zone of combat operations and move toward territories controlled by our forces and to the Russian border are stopped, up to the use of physical violence. We have concrete facts when whole families with children were shot at from submachine guns. People moving toward Russia are enemies for the Ukrainian authorities. The Ukrainian side is attempting to attack along the entire contact line, but so far they are failing. Our forces are repelling these attacks," he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.

According to Ganchev, Ukrainian troops planned a provocation at the dike of the Pechenezhskoye dam lake, where a humanitarian corridor was organized. "The provocation was meant to bar people from leaving the Ukraine-controlled territory," he said. "It was planned to blow up this dike along with people and picture it as a bombardment by Russian forces."

A number of districts of the Kharkov region are controlled by Russian troops and forces of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR).