«About 200 people live there, but there is no connection with them», — Deputy Mayor of Ochakiv on the situation in occupied Kinburn

According to preliminary estimates by the Ukrainian authorities, about 200 people live on the occupied Kinburn Peninsula, but contact with them has been completely lost.

This was stated by the deputy mayor of Ochakiv, Oleksii Vaskov, on the air of the MART TV channel.

Nothing is known for certain about the current situation in Kinburn. At the beginning of the invasion, the city authorities of Ochakiv organized evacuation corridors and brought in humanitarian aid, but after the full occupation of the peninsula, this became impossible.

— We can only guess what the situation is there at the moment. At the beginning of the invasion, we had communication, we also sent humanitarian aid there, took people out or, on the contrary, brought in those who wanted to return. The connection was exclusively by water. Before the occupation of Kherson, it was possible to reach Kinbourn by land through the Kherson region. We delivered humanitarian cargo with the help of both military and civilian ship owners. After the full occupation, the connection was cut off. At the beginning, some people contacted who stayed there. No one thought that it would be fully occupied. What the actual situation is, it is difficult to predict, because active military operations against Ochakov are being conducted precisely from Kinburn, and of course our military is responding, — said Oleksii Vaskov.

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Among those who remained on the Kinburn spit were those who managed to leave for third countries through the Crimea.

— According to our calculations, there are about 200 local people left there. But these are preliminary calculations, because some left for Crimea, and through Crimea to other countries. We do not have complete information. There are, of course, minimum conditions for life, but to what extent they can be called normal, it is difficult to say. But if we imagine that the Kinburn spit is freed, then the demining process, in my opinion, will take more than one or two years. And we will have to forget about the Kinburn Spit, as a tourist pearl, a conservation fund, for a certain time, — he added.

We remind, the other day Major General of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Dmytro Marchenko stated that the temporarily occupied Kinburn spit in the Mykolayiv region is currently included in the complex of measures for offensive actions.

Last fall, the head of Mykolayiv RMA Vitalii Kim said that the release of the Kinburn spit is a matter of time, «not a very long one yet».

As you know, as of July 2023, the damage caused to the protected territory of the Kinburn spit in the Mykolaiv Oblast due to Russia's military aggression amounted to 15.6 billion hryvnias.