Parents hide children How a Ukrainian town prepares for Putin's invasion
In the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a strategically important location, parents hide their children from the local authorities. They want to escape a forced evacuation.
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- Parents in the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk are hiding their children from the local authorities to avoid forced evacuation.
- Residents are told to leave the city quickly because the Russian advance is progressing rapidly.
- Residents who leave the Pokrovsk area are offered refuge in western Ukraine.
With Russian troops advancing rapidly in eastern Ukraine, many civilians have already fled the city of Pokrovsk after the authorities ordered their evacuation. People of all ages, many with children in their arms, boarded trains and buses to leave the area.
The entire community includes the city of Pokrovsk, the nearby town of Myrnohrad and 39 surrounding villages. In the Donetsk region of Ukraine, children are being forcibly evacuated with their parents or other guardians from certain districts, including Pokrovsk.
However, some parents continue to hide their children from the local authorities to avoid forced evacuation, writes CNN. Yuri Tretiak, the head of the military administration in Myrnohrad, explains: "We have cases of parents hiding their children. We will hold a meeting with the police to discuss how we will cooperate with such people, how we will search for such parents who hide their children and make false statements that the children have been gone for a long time".
The administration is now even planning home visits, as the advance of Russian troops is progressing so quickly that families will have to leave the area at all costs. There are only two weeks left for a safe evacuation, officials said in an interview on Radio Liberty. They warned that the Russians were only about ten kilometers away from the edge of the city. The pressure on the residents is increasing.
Natalja Ivanjuk reports that the noise of Russian bombardment could be heard as she and her two young daughters fled from their house in the nearby village of Myrnohrad. "It was terribly frightening," Ivanyuk told the AP news agency. "We barely made it out."
Evheniya, a 65-year-old cook from Pokrovsk, told CNN that she doesn't want to leave the city even though she is terrified: "At night I hear explosions and I sit up. It's so scary when you're alone. I wait for it to calm down, and just as I lie down again, it continues."
Important logistics hub
Pokrovsk is not large, a small town with a population of around 60,000 before the Russian war of aggression. But it is one of Ukraine's defense strongholds and an important logistics hub in the Donetsk region. Its capture would severely jeopardize Ukraine's defence capabilities and supply routes.
"There's a lot of destruction around us, so it's getting scarier and scarier to stay," said 57-year-old Tetjana Myronenko, who came from Selydowe, about five kilometers from the front. Together with her husband, she was waiting in a train carriage in Pokrovsk for the journey to Lviv - hundreds of kilometers away in western Ukraine.
Residents leaving the Pokrovsk area were offered refuge in western Ukraine, where accommodation was prepared for them. Families with children would be safe there for the time being.
