Kyiv's mayor tells residents to consider temporarily moving to city's outskirts as Russian missiles target basic utilities

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Thursday that Kyiv residents who can should consider temporarily leaving the city due to power, water, and heat outages.

“If any of you have houses in the outskirts of Kyiv, [or] if you have friends or acquaintances with houses that have a stove, heat, and autonomous water supply, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to think about staying there for a while,” Ukrainian media quoted Klitschko as saying.

At the moment, Klitschko stressed, authorities are not considering evacuating the city. “But we are considering the possibility of having some people move to Kyiv’s outskirts: orphanages, nursing homes. It can’t be called an evacuation, but we’re looking at temporarily moving certain population groups. Though that’s not what we’re talking about [in today’s announcement]. But we need to have multiple [plans].”

After Russia launched a large-scale shelling attack on Kyiv and other cities on November 23, city authorities reported on November 24 that 70 percent of residential buildings in the city were without power, but that water had been restored in all districts.