No more time to waste.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday evening urged the population to evacuate the Donetsk region in the east of the country, whose cities are the target of deadly bombardments, to escape "Russian terror".
"A government decision has been taken on the mandatory evacuation of the Donetsk region," said the Ukrainian President.
"Please evacuate," he added in a video address.
"At this stage of the war, terror is Russia's main weapon," he said, as Russian strikes on towns in the region claim civilian casualties almost every day.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk had previously announced the compulsory evacuation for the entire population of the Donetsk region, one of the two administrative regions of the Donbass basin, which remains partly under the control of kyiv.
She had justified this decision, in declarations on television, by the destruction of the gas networks and the absence of heating next winter in the region.
Daily casualties
Russian strikes on towns in the region cause casualties among the civilian population almost every day.
On Friday, the bombing of a barracks housing Ukrainian soldiers prisoners in Olenivka, in territory occupied by the Russians in the Donetsk region, left around fifty dead.
A "deliberate Russian war crime", denounced President Zelensky.
Ukrainian human rights official Dmytro Lubinetsk announced on Saturday that he had asked the Red Cross and the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission, which had supervised in May the surrender negotiated with the Russians of the defenders of the Azovstal factory in Mariupol (southeast), to go to Olenivka.
After long weeks of siege and resistance at the steel site, around 2,500 Ukrainian fighters had surrendered and Moscow had let it be known that they would be imprisoned at Olenivka.
“When the Azovstal defenders left the factory, the UN and the ICRC acted as guarantors of the life and health of our soldiers,” Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday evening, calling on the UN and the Cross -Red to "react".
France expresses its “horror”
The European Union condemned Friday evening "the atrocities committed by the Russian armed forces and their auxiliaries", in a statement by its head of diplomacy Josep Borrell targeting both the bombardment of the prison and accusations of torture and emasculation of a Ukrainian prisoner, a video of which circulated on social networks.
France expressed "its horror at the reports of murders and acts of torture against Ukrainian prisoners of war, in the detention center of Olenivka, under the protection of the Russian Federation", adding that the case if necessary, those responsible will have to “answer for their actions”, in a press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Tension over the fate of thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war in the hands of the Russians or Donbass separatists was further heightened by a tweet on Friday evening from the Russian Embassy in the UK, specifically targeting the Ukrainian nationalist regiment Azov.
“Azov fighters deserve to be executed, but not by firing squad, by hanging.
They are not real soldiers.
They deserve a humiliating death,” the tweet read in English.