KIEV, November 25. /TASS/. Ukraine’s ministry of the reintegration of temporarily occupied territories has announced the beginning of the evacuation of resident from the Kiev-controlled city of Kherson.
"Free evacuation from Kherson has started. Today, a train with the first 100 Kherson residents left Kherson for Khmelnitsky," the ministry wrote on its Facebook (outlawed in Russia as belonging to the Meta corporation, which is recognized as extremist in Russia) account.
According to the ministry, people can also be evacuated by buses to Odessa, Nikolayev and Krivoy Rog.
It was reported earlier on Friday that Ukrainian authorities were evacuating patients from Kherson hospitals to Nikolayev and Odessa.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu on November 9 ordered a pullback of troops from the right bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson Region to its left bank, a move suggested by Commander of Russia’s Integrated Group of Forces in Ukraine Sergey Surovikin, who stressed that the Russian military had successfully repulsed all Ukrainian attacks. The decision to move the forces back, in his words, was also due to the risk of their isolation, should territories downstream from the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant be flooded. Surovikin said that all civilians who wished to leave - more than 115,000 people - had already been evacuated from the right bank.