Officials in Kyiv have told people to evacuate the city for the first time since March because Russian missile attacks have destroyed its power generation systems.
Vitaliy Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv and a former world heavyweight boxing champion, said that 450,000 apartments in the city now didn’t have any electricity.
“If you have relatives or friends in the suburbs of Kyiv who have a separate water supply, a stove and heating, plan to stay there temporarily,” he said in comments to Ukrainian media on Saturday evening.
“Please make arrangements so that in the event of a bad scenario, you can stay with your friends or acquaintances for a while.” Kyiv city officials later told the New York Times newspaper that plans had been drawn up to evacuate the entire city, which had a pre-war population of 3 million people.
These plans highlight the Kremlin’s latest strategy for its war in Ukraine. Suffering losses on Ukraine’s battlefields, the Kremlin has ordered missile strikes on civilian infrastructure.