Ukrainian officials said that a 45-year-old resident of Kupiansk died under Russian artillery shelling on Tuesday morning, as attacks on the northeastern city mounted and authorities stepped up calls for civilians to evacuate.

Since early this month, more than 1,400 people, including 343 children, have been evacuated from frontline areas near Kupiansk, according to Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the regional military administration. The city is in Russia’s crosshairs as it goes on the offensive in northeastern Ukraine, even as its forces are defending other parts of the front line.

“We continue to work on the evacuation of the civilian population from dangerous regions of the Kupiansk district,” Syniehubov said in a post on the Telegram messaging app on Monday.

But the figures Syniehubov announced fall far short of the 11,000 people authorities said this month that they planned to relocate when they announced a mandatory evacuation order from the Kupiansk district, which was home to about 60,000 people before the war.

The city of Kupiansk, only 40km from the Russian border, fell to Moscow’s forces at the beginning of the full-scale invasion last year and remained under occupation for six months. Ukrainian forces retook it in a lightning counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region last September.

But since then, Russian forces have constantly pounded the area with artillery, making it impossible to go back to everyday life. In recent weeks, as Russian forces have pushed to retake some of the lands in the region they lost last fall, they have made some small gains around Kupiansk.

The situation has led a top Ukrainian military commander to call for more reinforcements in the area.

Local authorities had already been calling for civilians to evacuate Kupiansk and nearby settlements earlier this year. The calls grew louder as Russian forces advanced in the area, but some residents have been reluctant to leave, saying they fear economic insecurity if they were to relocate.

Syniehubov, the local official, said the Kupiansk resident who died on Tuesday morning was killed while working as a security guard in a meat processing plant that was damaged in artillery shelling.

Farther south, in the Donetsk region, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday that five people died in Russian strikes. Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration, said in a Telegram post that a dozen villages and towns in the area had been under fire.