Ukraine has announced it was ordering the evacuation of children and their guardians from several towns and villages in the eastern Donetsk region, where fighting with Russia is intensifying.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russian firepower is now concentrated on the Donetsk region, which the Kremlin claimed to have annexed in 2022, despite not having full control over it.
“This is an important decision designed primarily to save the lives of our children,” the Donetsk regional governor Vadym Filashkin said on social media.
“The security situation in the region is constantly deteriorating, and the intensity of shelling is increasing.”
He listed the town of Lyman, which was briefly held by Russian forces before being recaptured, as well as several other villages near the frontline, including the hamlet of Progres.
In the early months of the war, Mr Zelensky urged all residents of the industrial Donetsk region to flee but those orders were not enforced.
Ukraine was forced last month to divert manpower to the northern Kharkiv region from other areas of the front line after Russian forces launched a ground offensive into the border territory.
Separately, Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence has said a Russian tugboat was destroye don the coast of the Moscow-annexed Crimean peninsula early this morning.
Grayscale footage published by the GUR showed what appeared to be a drone quickly approaching a ship on a body of water before the connection is lost.
“A special unit of the Ninth Department of Ukraine’s military intelligence successfully struck a Russian raid tugboat off the coast of the temporarily occupied Crimea,” the GUR said.
It identified the boat as either the “Saturn” or “Proteus”, and said the attack took place in Lake Panske, a lagoon on Crimea’s northwest coast adjoining the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s underpowered navy has inflicted a string of successful hits on Russia in the Black Sea, despite facing setbacks on land, where it is losing ground.
The sinkings are an embarrassment for Moscow, which has been forced to move boats from its historic Sevastopol naval base in Crimea to the port of Novorossiysk, further east.
US will not abandon Ukraine – Biden
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden has said the United States would would not abandon Ukraine.
“We will not walk away because if we do Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there,” Mr Biden said at a ceremony in France to mark the 80th anniversary of the World War II D-Day landings.
“Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened,” he added, describing Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “tyrant bent on domination”.
“There are things that are worth fighting and dying for. Freedom is worth it. Democracy is worth it,” he said.
He praised NATO as “the greatest military alliance in the history of the world.”
“NATO is more united than ever and even more prepared to keep the peace,” he said in a thinly veiled message to Mr Putin.
