Terrified villagers flee as the battle for Kherson rages on

As she was driven by her son out of Dudchany, a small village in the north-east of the Kherson region a few days ago, Rosaliya Kovalchuk, 72, glimpsed something that will haunt her forever.

- Daniel Boffey

"Hanging from the branches of a tree were guts from a man's belly," Kovalchuk said. "A military car had been blown up. I think he was Russian from the boots and the uniform." Dudchany, one of the stepping stones down the Dnieper River to Kherson city, the regional capital 125km to the south-west, is at the centre of fierce fighting that the west says could be pivotal in the outcome of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.

Russian-installed authorities last weekend ordered all residents of the city of Kherson to leave "immediately" ahead of an expected advance by Ukrainian troops. Residents were told to take "documents, money, valuables and clothes".

The US think tank the Institute for the Study of War said the call indicated that the occupiers "do not expect a rapid Russian or civilian return" to the city, and appeared to be trying to depopulate it to damage its "long-term social and economic viability".

Kherson city was taken in the very early days of the war and remains the only regional capital to fall to Russia. But a summer counter-offensive launched by Volodymyr Zelenskiy's forces in the wider south Ukrainian region has enjoyed dazzling results, with village after village retaken in the last few weeks.

The symbolic and strategic importance of Ukraine's assault was underlined by Putin's announcement earlier this month that the region, along with Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, had been "annexed" into the Russian federation, which provoked as much mockery as it did diplomatic outrage given the continuing battle.