Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed during a Sunday evening address that Kyiv’s troops have made progress in its recently launched counter-offensive, with its forces taking two settlements in the south, a third in the east, as well as additional territory in the east of Ukraine.
Zelenskyy thanked Ukrainian forces for liberating a settlement in the eastern Donetsk region, two southern settlements, and for taking over certain heights in an eastern area in the Lysychansk-Siversk direction.
Noting that the Ukrainian flags are returning to the places where they should be by right, Zelenskyy provided no timeline and avoided saying precisely where the territories were apart citing his military commanders and head of intelligence’s good reports.
In addition to Zelenskyy’s address, the deputy head of the president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, posted an image of soldiers raising the Ukrainian flag over a village in Ukraine’s south he said was Vysokopillya in the Kherson region.
Meanwhile, four of the six members of the International Atomic Energy Agency inspection team at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant have left after completing their work while the remaining two are expected to remain at the facility on a permanent basis, Ukraine’s state nuclear energy provider said Monday.
Several hours before, Vladimir Rogov, a senior pro-Russian official in the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia, informed that the IAEA’s current mission to the plant would end Tuesday acknowledging, however, the uncertainty over the timeline.
Previously on Saturday, IAEA also said in a statement that only one of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant’s six reactors remained in operation after it had its last remaining main external power line cut off, although a reserve line continued supplying electricity to the grid.
As fighting continues in the area of the plant that’s on the front line of the war in Ukraine, the loss of external power heightened the fears of a radiation disaster.