MOSCOW, October 25. /TASS/. Plans are afoot to evacuate 275 children from 10 settlements in the Kupyansk District of the Kharkov Region, said Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the regional military administration.
"We are preparing a decision to forcibly evacuate families with children from 10 settlements of the Kupyanskaya, Kondrashevskaya and Kurilovskaya communities in the Kupyansk District. There are 275 children there," he said on Telegram.
Sinegubov said children can only be evacuated when accompanied by at least one of their parents or guardians.
The official also advised people to evacuate from the Borovskaya community in the Izyum District.
"There are 8,900 people living there now, including 844 children," he said.
The Ukrainian Reintegration Ministry said in early October that since April the authorities had forcibly evacuated 856 children from the Kharkov Region and from the Kiev-controlled territories of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Zaporozhye Region, including 79 children from 17 settlements in the Kupyansk District of the Kharkov Region.
Ukraine has been evacuating people from some areas under its control for security reasons. The head of the military-civil administration of Kharkov Region, Vitaliy Ganchev, earlier said that residents of the region often did not want to evacuate. He said the evacuation efforts were related to the Ukrainian military’s preparations for defense. According to the official, refusal to evacuate can entail serious problems.
Kherson Region Governor Vladimir Saldo said in late September that the Ukrainian authorities were forcibly relocating residents from 31 settlements in the parts of the region that are under their control. According to the governor, Ukrainian security forces often resorted to intimidation and took away children from their parents for this purpose. He said men were immediately sent to recruitment offices and then to the combat zone.