Russian authorities in the occupied territories of Ukraine are dismantling the regions' health care systems, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy said in his daily address Friday.
"The occupiers have decided to close medical institutions in the cities, take away equipment, ambulances — just everything. ... They put pressure on the doctors who still remained in the occupied areas for them to move to the territory of Russia," the president said.
"Russia is turning the Kherson region into a zone without civilization, without elementary things available in most countries of the world. Before the arrival of Russia, this region, like all other regions of Ukraine, was completely normal and safe, all social services for people were guaranteed there. ... Life was guaranteed there."Volodomyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine
"And now Russia is trying to make the Kherson region literally an exclusion zone,” the president said. “The world must react to this."
The Kherson region was also the focus of Britain’s Defense Ministry's intelligence update Saturday. The report said that earlier in the week, Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-appointed governor of the Kherson region, claimed more than 70,000 people had left Kherson city.
The update said Saldo also claimed that "Russia had removed the remains of a well-known 18th century Russian statesman, Prince Grigory Potemkin, from his tomb in Kherson's cathedral to east of the Dnipro."
"In the Russian national identity," the report said, "Potemkin is heavily associated with the Russian conquest of Ukrainian lands in the 18th century and highlights the weight Putin almost certainly places on perceived historical justification for the invasion."
(KB/VOA)
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