In a regular nightly video address to the nation, Zelensky said hundreds of thousands of people still lived in the industrial heartland where “the fiercest battles” took place. He told the Ukrainians that “there must be an evacuation of Donetsk . . . now’ so that ‘the Russian army’ will kill fewer people. Moscow is trying to seize the entire eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, consisting of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russian forces now occupy all of Luhansk. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has documented more than 5,200 civilian deaths in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion and believes more have been killed amid Russia’s shelling of civilian areas. Moscow has refocused its war effort since late March on eastern Ukraine, having failed to capture the capital Kyiv in the weeks following its February 24 invasion, focusing on capturing the remaining territory of the Donbass, the region the Russians invaded secretly in 2014. Ukraine, using advanced weapons supplied by the West, managed to disrupt Russian supply lines and logistics. Kyiv has been slowly regaining territory in the south, and the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in June that Ukrainian forces had liberated more territory than they had lost since the invasion began. In the Russian-held Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, which was also seized by force in 2014, the Russian governor of Sevastopol said on Sunday that a drone had struck the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, injuring five people. The alleged drone strike took place on Russia’s Navy Day, and celebrations in Sevastopol were subsequently cancelled. The Financial Times could not independently confirm the attack. On his Telegram channel, governor Mikhail Razvozhayev said the Federal Security Service is investigating the incident. The press service of the Black Sea Fleet said that “a low-yield explosive device mounted on an improvised drone” hit the area. A regional Ukrainian official denied involvement in the alleged drone attack. Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Odessa Military Command, described the incident as a “false flag” operation and said that “Ukraine would liberate Crimea by other means.” In April the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, its flagship in the Black Sea, was sunk by Ukrainian missiles.

The alleged Sevastopol strike comes after Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the UN signed an agreement last week to clear sea lanes for the export of Ukrainian grain to neighboring countries. A spokesman for Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry said on Sunday that three ports in Odesa were “still awaiting” permission as 16 ships loaded with grain awaited departure. Shipments would “probably” start “tomorrow, but I’m not sure,” Julia Vernichor told the Financial Times. Ibrahim Kalin, a senior adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told Kanal 7 television that the first ship carrying Ukrainian grain is likely to leave the port of Odessa on Monday. “There are some small bugs and some issues that are still being negotiated with the Russians. If these are sorted, the likelihood of a ship leaving tomorrow morning is high. . . We will see these ships start leaving today, tomorrow or the next day at the latest.” The uncertainty over the timing of grain shipments comes as Kyiv confirmed that the owner of one of Ukraine’s largest agricultural companies and his wife were killed in overnight bombings in the southern port city of Mykolayiv. Oleksiy Vadatursky was the founder and owner of Nibulon, a grain exporting group. None of the warring sides have released details of their casualties in the bloodiest war on the European continent since the second world war. Zelensky urged the West to label Russia a “terrorist state” in response to atrocities among civilians, including sexual violence, indiscriminate killings of civilians and looting. Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul