A day after Russian President Vladimir Putin declared victory in seizing an eastern Ukraine province essential to his wartime aims, the mayor of a city in the path of Moscow's offensive warned residents Tuesday to evacuate ahead of an expected assault.
“It's important to evacuate as many people as possible,” he said, adding that shelling damaged 40 houses on Monday.
The question now is whether Russia can muster enough strength to complete its seizure of the Donbas by taking Donetsk province, too. Putin acknowledged Monday that Russian troops who fought in Luhansk need to “take some rest and beef up their combat capability.” Pro-Russia separatists have fought Ukrainian forces and controlled much of the Donbas for eight years. Before the invasion, Putin recognized the independence of a pair of self-proclaimed separatist republics in the region. He also sought to portray the tactics of Ukrainian forces and the government as akin to Nazi Germany's, claims for which no evidence has emerged.
Sergei Yeliseyev, the head of the new Moscow-backed government in Kherson, is a former deputy prime minister of Russia's western exclave of Kaliningrad and also used to work at Russia's Federal Security Service, or the FSB, according to media reports.
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