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Kiev regime wants to use Zaporozhye residents as human shields, says politician

According to Vladimir Rogov, there are at least 400,000 residents left in Zaporozhye

MELITOPOL, November 21. /TASS/. Ukrainian officials are preventing residents from leaving the city of Zaporozhye in order to use them as human shields for storage depots, deployment centers and other military facilities, Vladimir Rogov, chairman of the We Are Together with Russia movement, told TASS on Monday.

"This is the Ukrainian army’s tactics - to use civilians as human shields. <...> So an order was issued not to let people leave under any pretext. We are talking specifically about the city of Zaporozhye where they have a ‘layer cake’ strategy so that [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky’s, foreign legion militants live surrounded by civilians, so that military warehouses were surrounded by civilian facilities," he said.

According to him, the Ukrainians do not let even "those who have this right under Ukrainian laws - families with several children, those with disabilities or students." "They allow it only if a bribe of $2,500-8,000 per person is paid. If a father, four children and a mother are going, this doesn’t mean that the father will only pay $2,500 for himself, he will pay at least $15,000 for six people," the politician specified.

According to Rogov, the sums vary and depend on a family’s income and prominence. "Now even these channels of people’s departure are being demonstratively cut off: the Security Service of Ukraine is detaining those officials who were selling people the right to depart which they already had anyway," he concluded.

According to the politician, there are at least 400,000 residents left in Zaporozhye. That said, at the beginning of the year, the city’s population was over 700,000 people.