Ukraine

May 26 (Reuters) - Ukraine's defence ministry on Friday said Russia was planning to simulate a major accident at a nuclear power station controlled by pro-Moscow forces to try to thwart a long-planned Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake territory occupied by Russia.

The Zaporizhzhia plant, which lies in an area of Russian-occupied southern Ukraine, is Europe's biggest nuclear power station and the area has been repeatedly hit by shelling that both sides blame each other for.

26 May 2023; AA: The humanitarian organizations have lost access to 60,000 people in Ukraine due to the worsening security situation on the front lines, the UN said on Friday.

"Assistance to areas under Russian military control remained extremely limited,"Jens Laerke, the spokesperson of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told a UN briefing in Geneva.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s southern Belgorod region bordering Ukraine came under attack Friday from Ukrainian artillery fire, mortar shells and drones, authorities said, hours after two drones struck a Russian city in an area next to the annexed Crimea Peninsula.

Moscow’s forces, meanwhile, struck a building containing psychology and veterinary clinics in the city of Dnipro, in central Ukraine, killing two people and wounding 30, including two children, Ukrainian officials said.

KYIV, May 26 (Reuters) - Ukraine shot down 10 missiles and over 20 drones launched by Russia in overnight attacks on the capital Kyiv, the city of Dnipro and eastern regions, Ukrainian officials said on Friday.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office said in a statement that a fire had broken out on the outskirts of the northeastern city of Kharkiv after an oil depot was hit twice, and that equipment for pumping oil products had been damaged.

LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — The two children squinted to see through the thick smoke that hung in the air after a deafening blast shook their small home in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

The pair, ages 9 and 10, called out for their father. Only eerie silence followed.

Then Olha Hinkina and her brother, Andrii, rushed to the bomb shelter, as they had been taught. When the booms stopped and the smoke cleared, they found their father on the porch — motionless and covered in blood after being struck by a Russian projectile.

NEAR THE RUSSIAN BORDER, Ukraine, May 24 (Reuters) - The Russian commander of a militia that conducted a raid on a Russian border region this week said on Wednesday his group would soon launch more incursions into Russian territory.

Denis Kapustin, who described himself as the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), spoke to reporters on the Ukrainian side of the border with Russia a day after Moscow said it had repelled the raid on the Belgorod region.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The head of the Russian private army Wagner says his force lost more than 20,000 men in the drawn-out battle for Bakhmut, with about half of those who died in the eastern Ukrainian city being Russian convicts recruited to fight in the 15-month-old war.

The figure stood in stark contrast to the widely disputed claims from Moscow that just over 6,000 of its troops were killed throughout the war as of January. By comparison, official Soviet troop losses in the 1979-89 Afghanistan war were 15,000.

KYIV, May 23 (Reuters) - Ukraine's foreign minister began a tour of African countries this week, stepping up wartime Kyiv's diplomatic push to challenge Russian influence in the "Global South" and cement the vision laid out by Ukraine as the only path to peace.

Top diplomat Dmytro Kuleba said his main priority was to get African countries to endorse President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's peace plan as he travelled to Morocco on his second tour of Africa since Russia invaded in February last year.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s military said Tuesday it quashed what appeared to be one of the most serious cross-border attacks from Ukraine since the war began, claiming to have killed more than 70 attackers in a battle that lasted around 24 hours.

Moscow blamed the raid that began Monday on Ukrainian military saboteurs. Kyiv portrayed it as an uprising against the Kremlin by Russian partisans. It was impossible to reconcile the two versions, to say with certainty who was behind the attack or to ascertain its aims.

May 22 (Reuters) - Ukraine reconnected the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to its external power supply on Monday after a brief outage that had left it reliant on emergency generators.

Back-up diesel generators had earlier kicked in at the plant in southern Ukraine to ensure nuclear fuel was kept cool and prevent a potential disaster.