KYIV
\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday visited the east Ukraine city of Izyum, the military said, one of the largest cities recently recaptured from Russia by Kyiv\u2019s army in a lightning counter-offensive.
\nThe military in a statement on social media that Zelensky and military officials \u201ctook part\u201d in a ceremony raising the Ukrainian flag over the captured city, which was key for Russia\u2019s ambitions to capture the Donbas region.
\nPictures distributed separately by Zelensky\u2019s office showed the Ukrainian leader wearing dark-green and flanked by guards as he was taking selfies with soldiers and meeting troops at a flag-rising ceremony.
\nUkraine has claimed sweeping successes in the northeastern Kharkiv region that borders Russia in recent days and also claims to have clawed back territory along a southern front near the Kherson region on the Black Sea.
\nKyiv says since the beginning of September its forces have retaken hundreds of village, towns and cities that were captured by Russian forces that invaded Ukraine on February 24.
\nMoscow said Wednesday however that its forces were hitting back on areas recaptured in Kharkiv with \u201cmassive strikes,\u201d claiming \u2014 without providing evidence \u2014 to have inflicted losses on Ukrainian military hardware and servicemen.
\nIn a battlefield update on Wednesday, Russia also claimed to have captured dozens of Ukrainian servicemen in the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
\nThe Ukrainian official in charge of the eastern Donetsk region, which has been partially controlled by pro-Moscow separatists since 2014 said Russian forces had attacked the entire frontline region over the past 24 hours.
\nPavlo Kyrylenko, the Donetsk governor, said one civilian had been killed and again urged all others to leave, describing the order as a \u201cmatter of life and death.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KYIV Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday visited the east Ukraine city of Izyum, the military said, one of the largest cities recently recaptured from Russia by Kyiv\u2019s army in a lightning counter-offensive. The military in a statement on social media that Zelensky and military officials \u201ctook part\u201d in a ceremony raising the Ukrainian flag […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283482,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-283467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n