Russia says it plans to set up army base in Ukraine's Kherson region

The Russia-appointed administration of Ukraine’s Kherson region will ask Moscow to set up a military base on its territory, Russia’s RIA news agency quoted a local government official as saying on Tuesday.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February, seizing in particular the Kherson region which is adjacent to Crimea, the peninsula which Moscow has controlled since an earlier conflict in 2014. It has installed a new administration there and started introducing the Russian rouble as a currency.

“There should be a Russian military base in the Kherson region,” Kirill Stremousov, the deputy head of what Russia calls the “civil-military regional administration” of Kherson, told RIA.

“We will ask for this and this is what the whole population wants. This is essential and will be a guarantor of security for the region and its inhabitants.”

The Kremlin calls the invasion a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of radical anti-Russian nationalists. Ukraine and its allies have dismissed that as a baseless pretext for the war, which has killed thousands of people in Ukraine and displaced millions.

Russia launches all-out assault to encircle Ukraine troops in east

Russian forces were launching an all-out assault to encircle Ukrainian troops in twin cities straddling a river in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, a battle which could determine the success or failure of Moscow’s main campaign in the east.

Exactly three months after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, authorities in its second-largest city Kharkiv re-opened the underground metro, where thousands of civilians had sheltered for months under relentless bombardment.

The reopening was evidence of Ukraine’s biggest military success over the past few weeks: pushing Russian forces largely out of artillery range of Kharkiv, as they did from the capital Kyiv in March.

But the decisive battles of the war’s latest phase are still raging further south, where Moscow is attempting to seize the Donbas region of two eastern provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk, and trap Ukrainian forces in a pocket on the main eastern front.