Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko advises residents with friends or family outside the city to consider leaving temporarily amid escalating Russian attacks

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has suggested that residents with friends or relatives outside the Ukrainian capital consider leaving the city temporarily, he told AFP in an interview.

“Every day brings new reports of destroyed buildings, of people injured and killed, as the shelling of our city intensifies,” the mayor said. “Today the issue is survival,” he added.

He stressed that he would never call for a full evacuation of the city.

“That’s Putin’s goal… the best scenario for Putin is that we all leave and hand over our empty cities and our country to him,” Klitschko said.

Klitschko also said Kyiv is preparing backup heating systems for winter and stockpiling fuel, food, and drinking water. But he said even proper preparations might not be enough if air defenses cannot repel the attacks.

Russia began stepping up its attacks on Kyiv in September. Daily attacks from September 22 to 28 alone killed 13 Kyiv residents and injured more than 160. In early October, Russian forces also began striking some of Kyiv’s most important transport links — the bridges across the Dnipro River, which had not previously come under attack. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian military commanders to disregard the rules of warfare when carrying out airstrikes on Ukraine.