About 4,000 Residents Remain In Bakhmut, Among Them 38 Children - Vereshchuk

About 4,000 residents, including 38 children, remain in Bakhmut of the Donetsk Region, which is the hottest place on the front line. Iryna Vereshchuk, the Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, said this on the air of the national telethon, Ukrainian News Agency reports.

"As of today, less than 4,000 people remain in Bakhmut. When we talk about children, approximately 38 children, as far as we know, remain in Bakhmut today," she said.

When asked by the presenter why women with children do not evacuate, the Vice Prime Minister replied that it is connected with hostilities, as well as with an information vacuum, it is difficult to communicate there and people are in a state of stress, psychologists say that such a state is due to prolonged dense shelling, when people do not adequately assess the threat.

Vereshchuk noted that there are special evacuation groups that help to get there, armored vehicles, but people are often in basements without leaving information about their whereabouts and this makes evacuation much more difficult.

The Vice Prime Minister said that before the war, more than 70,000 people (including 12,000 children) lived in Bakhmut, now 95% of them have been evacuated.

Currently, according to her, about 80% of the houses in Bakhmut have been damaged as a result of hostilities.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, the Ministry of Reintegration is initiating the introduction of forced evacuation of children from areas of active hostilities.

According to the Ministry of Reintegration, since August 2022, mandatory evacuation from the Donetsk Region has been underway, in 7 months almost 50,000 citizens have moved to safe regions, including more than 6,000 children and more than 2,000 people with reduced mobility.

Evacuation from the de-occupied territories, which began last autumn, is also continuing. Within it, more than 24,000 people left the Kharkiv Region in half a year, and more than 19,000 citizens were evacuated from the liberated territories of the Kherson Region in 4 months.