“The city is constantly under fire,” Oleksiy Kharkivsky, a senior police officer from Vovchansk helping to coordinate the evacuations told AFP.

“Everything in the city is being destroyed… You hear constant explosions, artillery, mortars. The enemy is hitting the city with everything they have,” he said, speaking at an evacuation point in a village near Vovchansk.

He estimated that around 1,500 people had been evacuated or fled Vovchansk since Friday and said there had been 32 drone strikes on the town over the past 24 hours.

He said evacuation teams had come under fire “many times”.

One 61-year-old woman, Lyubov Nikolaieva, told AFP she had fled the border village of Lyptsi along with her 81-year-old mother.

“There is constant incoming fire: those guided aerial bombs and mortar shells whistling overhead. It became very scary,” she said.