Ukrainian president back in Kyiv as Russia continues attacks
Volodymyr Zelensky secured a new military aid package on his trip to the US.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has sounded another defiant note on his return to his nation’s capital Kyiv following a wartime visit to the United States, even as Russia launched new strikes across the country.
Mr Zelensky posted on his Telegram account that his forces are “working toward victory” following a US trip that secured a new 1.8 billion dollar (£1.49 billion) military aid package, and pledged that “we’ll overcome everything”.
Officials in Moscow repeated that there would be no end to the war until its military objectives are achieved.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the war would end at the negotiating table once the “special military operation” achieves “the goals that the Russian Federation has set”, adding that “a significant headway has been made on demilitarisation of Ukraine”.
Mr Peskov said Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to visit a weapons factory in Tula, about 90 miles south of Moscow, and chair a meeting on the country’s arms industry.
The Ukrainian military said Russian forces fired multiple rockets “more than 70 times” across Ukrainian territory overnight, while fierce battles raged around the city of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region where regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said four people were killed and seven others were wounded over the past day.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said Bakhmut and Lyman in the neighbouring Luhansk region as well as the front line between the Luhansk and Kharkiv regions bore the brunt of the Russian strikes, but did not specify to what degree.
Kherson regional governor Yaroslav Yanushevych posted on Telegram that Russian forces attacked from dug-in positions on the right bank of the Dnieper river, hitting educational institutions, apartment blocks and private homes.
In the eastern Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, Ukraine’s military said Russia launched six missile strikes and as many air attacks on civilian targets while Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks on or near 19 settlements in the north and east.
Russian shelling overnight also struck a district hospital in the north-eastern city of Volchansk, Kharkiv region, wounding five people, according to local governor Oleh Syniehubov.
He Syniehubov posted on Telegram that the four men and one woman were all in “moderate condition”.
