Zelenskiy hails efforts to restore power
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said power workers did such a good job repairing the damage caused by Russian missile and drone strikes on Friday that most people didn’t face too many outages on Saturday and Sunday, but warned that it is too early to declare victory on the energy front. BATTLE
* Ukrainian forces are holding their defenses along the frontline in eastern Donetsk region, including the besieged town of Bakhmut, with the fiercest fighting around the towns of Vuhledar and Maryinka, Kiev’s top military commander said on Saturday. * Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia’s Wagner Group, said Sunday that the mercenary force had taken the village of Krasna Hora on the northern outskirts of Bakhmut.
* Prigozhin said on Saturday it could be two years before Moscow controls all two eastern Ukrainian regions it has declared the war’s main objective to capture. * A 53-year-old woman was killed on Sunday morning after Russian forces shelled an apartment building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Nikopol, the regional governor said.
* Galina Danilchenko, the Russian-installed mayor of Ukraine’s city of Melitopol in southeastern Zaporizhia Region, said on Saturday a civilian was killed and two injured in a nighttime shelling by Ukrainian forces. * Reuters could not verify the Battlefield accounts.
LEADERS IN NATO * NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will complete his term as scheduled in October, an alliance spokesman said after a newspaper reported that another extension was in the works.
ARMS * British arms and military vehicles could be manufactured under license in Ukraine, which would reduce the country’s dependence on arms supplies from Western allies, the Telegraph newspaper reported on Sunday.
DIPLOMACY * Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would not seek a meeting with Zelenskyy if he were still prime minister because he blames the Ukrainian president for the war with Russia, he said on Sunday.
* US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov discussed priorities, including air defenses and artillery, for the upcoming meetings of Kiev’s allies in Brussels, both sides said on Saturday. * Russia’s Sports Minister Oleg Matytsin said calls from more than 30 countries to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from the 2024 Olympics are unacceptable, the TASS news agency reported.
* Russian track and field stars are no strangers to being banned from international competitions, and the prospect of missing next year’s Olympics because of the invasion of Ukraine has fueled years of frustration with global sports federations. * NATO should hold an emergency meeting to discuss the latest findings on the explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said late Saturday.
(Compiled Frances Kerry and Lincoln Feast)
(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)