They poured into Kherson’s streets early Saturday, hugging police officers and waving the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag to commemorate the city’s second day of independence. “The Ukrainians will be repairing the electricity networks as well as the water facilities and internet in the coming days,” Aexei Sandakov, a city resident, told NBC News in a voice message Saturday. The documentary filmmaker said in a separate message on Friday that he was in downtown Kherson when a vehicle carrying Ukrainian soldiers passed by that afternoon. “Everyone wanted to hug them. The guys were at a loss for what to do. “We need more soldiers to hug them,” Sandakov explained. “Everyone is clapping, waving Ukrainian flags, and flashing lights at the cars,” he said.
As people continued to celebrate Saturday, waving flags and beeping car horns, Ihor Klymenko, the chief of Ukraine’s National Police, said in a Facebook post that 200 officers were working in the southern city. He stated that they were establishing checkpoints and documenting evidence of potential war crimes. Separately, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces stated on its Facebook page that it was “carrying out stabilization measures” in and around the city to ensure its safety.
It also stated that Russians were fortifying their battle lines on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River, which separates the Kherson region and the city of the same name. This claim cannot be independently verified by NBC News. In other news, Russian state news agency Tass quoted Aleksandr Fomin, a Kremlin-appointed official in Kherson’s administration, as saying on Saturday that Henichesk, a city on the Azov Sea about 125 miles southeast of Kherson, would serve as the region’s “temporary capital” after the withdrawal.
The Russian withdrawal from Kherson, the only regional capital its forces had captured since its invasion began in February, is one of the most significant blows to President Vladimir Putin yet, abandoning perhaps the most important prize of the war he launched nearly nine months ago and severely weakening his grip on the country’s south. After Russia held referendums in September that Kyiv and the West condemned as illegal and rigged, Moscow declared that it had annexed the Kherson region, as well as Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia.
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Source: nbcnews.com