Russia continues deportation of residents of Zaporizhzhya region under the guise of evacuation.
Russian forces are massively removing civilians from the occupied territories to the Russian Federation, the head of the Zaporizhzhya regional military administration, Yuriy Malashko, said on Monday.
As Malashko noted, the evacuations are not always voluntary.
The fact that the Russian military is forcibly evacuating residents to Russia is also reported by videos on social networks.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported in a Monday morning bulletin that Russian invaders are conducting a so-called evacuation of local residents from the temporarily occupied Tokmak, Zaporizhzhya Region, toward Berdyansk.
“This procedure is subject to representatives of the so-called “local authorities”, collaborators, children, teachers and educators. At the same time, parents are threatened not to count the school year if they refuse to “evacuate” the child. There are queues at gas stations for fuel, and all drivers are told that no new fuel deliveries are planned. In the locality of Vesele, Zaporizhzhya region, the local police department of the enemy is closed and not functioning. Destruction of documents of this institution was observed the day before”, reports the General Staff of the AFU.
According to Yevgeny Balitsky, the Moscow-appointed acting head of the region, more than 1,600 people, including 660 children, were evacuated from Russian-occupied towns and settlements near the front line in Zaporizhzhya last weekend.
The day before, the Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, also said that Russia had provoked a “mad panic” by evacuating the population of Energodar, which is located near the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.
For its part, the UN nuclear watchdog expressed concern about the safety of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, calling it “increasingly unpredictable”, due to the ongoing evacuation of areas near the facility.
It was Energodar where most of the plant’s employees lived, said Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in a statement.
Grossi said he was deeply concerned about the “increasingly tense, stressful and difficult conditions” for personnel and their families, as well as the “very real threats to nuclear safety that the plant is facing”.
