Volodymyr Zelensky made the statement in a video address to the nation on Tuesday night.
Ukraine’s president said: “Our warriors in the south and in the east are very actively destroying the enemy, physically clearing Ukraine. This will continue in the future.”
Zelensky added: “Protection against terror means the destruction of terrorists. And it is a guarantee that the evil state will never again have the opportunity to bring evil to Ukraine.”
Ukrainian forces have so far liberated eight settlements from Russia as the counteroffensive runs into its third week, officials in Kyiv said on Monday.
On Tuesday, Gen. Oleksander Syrskyi, Ukraine's commander of land forces, said on the Telegram messaging app that his troops were making progress on the flanks of the devastated eastern city of Bakhmut, which fell to Russian mercenaries in May after months of fighting, the Reuters news agency reported.
Syrskyi added that Ukrainian troops were repelling increasingly intense Russian attacks near Kupyansk in the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said that Ukrainian troops in the south were “gradually, in small steps, but very confidently, making advances."
Malyar added, as quoted on Wednesday by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper: “We could even use the allegory that we are carving up every metre of land from the enemy.”
Britain’s Ministry of Defence said in its daily update on the conflict that “intense fighting” was continuing in southern Ukraine.
Damage from Kakhovka dam collapse reaches EUR 1.2 bn: officials
The destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on Ukraine’s Dnipro river has caused EUR 1.2 billion of damage, Ukrainian Environment Minister Ruslan Strilets has told his European Union counterparts.
Speaking via video link to the EU’s Environment Council on Tuesday, Strilets warned that mines unearthed by flooding could wash onto the shores of other European countries and that “there are things that we can never restore - these are the ecosystems that were washed away into the Black Sea," The Guardian reported.
Last week, a group of international legal experts aiding Ukraine's prosecutors in their investigation into the Kakhovka dam blast issued preliminary findings, stating that it was highly likely the breaching of the dam in Ukraine's Kherson southern region had been caused by explosives planted by the Russians, according to Reuters.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, launching the largest military campaign in Europe since World War II.
Wednesday is day 483 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, president.gov.ua, Reuters, The Guardian, consilium.europa.eu
