MOSCOW — The new commander of Russian forces in Ukraine has described the situation around Kherson in the south of the country as “difficult” in the face of Ukrainian offensives.

Russian occupation authorities in the region say they are planning to move tens of thousands of civilians out of the area, providing “safe evacuation”.

The assessment from Sergei Surovikin, the air force general now commanding Russia’s invasion forces, is a rare acknowledgement of the pressures they are under as Ukraine’s army moves to retake areas that Moscow claimed to have annexed just weeks ago.

“The situation in the area of the ‘Special Military Operation’ can be described as tense,” he told the state-owned Rossiya 24 news channel. “The situation in this area (around Kherson) is difficult. The enemy is deliberately striking infrastructure and residential buildings in Kherson.”

Ukrainian strikes are targeting the city’s “social, economic and industrial infrastructure”, Surovikin claimed, leading to disruptions in the supply of electricity, water and food. He cited a “direct threat to the lives of the inhabitants” as justification for the need to evacuate.

“There are plans to evacuate 50,000 to 60,000 people to the left bank of the Dnipro,” Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin-installed chief in the Kherson region, said on Wednesday. This would take place at a rate of 10,000 people per day over six days, he added.

On Tuesday he announced an “organized, gradual displacement” of civilians from four towns along the river, to allow the Russian army to install “large-scale defensive constructions” in the face of a “vast counter-offensive” by Ukrainian forces.

Kherson is a symbolic target for Ukraine’s government. Russian forces in Kherson have been driven back by 20-30 kilometers in the last few weeks and are at risk of being pinned against the western bank of the 2,200-kilometer-long Dnipro river that bisects Ukraine.

Also in the south, a member of the Russian-installed council governing Zaporizhzhia said Ukraine’s forces had intensified their overnight shelling of Russian-held Enerhodar — the town where many of the employees of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station live.

Vladimir Rogov said artillery fire had hit the town’s outskirts and there had been 10 strikes around a thermal power station.

The Zaporizhzhia plant is in one of four Ukrainian regions Russia has proclaimed as annexed but only partly occupies, along with Kherson, and Donetsk and Luhansk in the east.

The battlefield reports cannot be independently verified.

The latest British military intelligence assessment said, “major elements of Russia’s military leadership are increasingly dysfunctional”.

Four out of five generals with direct operational command at the start of the invasion have since been dismissed, and their replacements have brought little improvement, it adds.

Russian airstrikes cut power and water supplies to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians on Tuesday, which President Zelensky said was part of a campaign to plunge the country into cold and darkness over the winter, making peace talks impossible.

Nearly one-third of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed in the past week, “causing massive blackouts across the country,” he said.

Tuesday’s Russian strikes hit a power plant in Kiev, killing three people, and energy infrastructure in Kharkiv in the east and Dnipro in the south.

A man sheltering in an apartment building in the southern port city Mykolaiv was also killed, while to the west of the capital the city of Zhytomyr was without water or electricity. — Euronews