\KYIV After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned of a hard winter and said that Russian troops were making progress in a counter-offensive, European leaders tried to make sure that high energy prices didn’t hurt the whole continent too much.
In his nightly speech on Sunday, Zelenskiy thanked his troops for taking two settlements in the south and a third settlement and more land in the east. He said that his military commanders and head of intelligence had given him “good reports.”
The deputy head of the president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, had earlier posted a picture of soldiers raising the Ukrainian flag over a village, which he said was in the main area of the counter-offensive in the south.
“Vysokopillya. Kherson region, Ukraine. Today, “Tymoshenko” wrote on Facebook (NASDAQ:META) over a picture of three soldiers on a roof, with one of them putting a Ukrainian flag on a post.
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Last week, Ukraine started its counterattack in the south, especially in the Kherson region, which Russia had taken early on in the war.
After Ukrainian forces shelled Russian troops in the area for a long time, the Russians stopped people from moving around and stopped them from crossing the Dnipro River, the Ukrainian general staff said on Monday.
In the last 24 hours, Russia has fired 25 missiles and more than 22 air strikes at military and civilian targets in Ukraine, the statement said. This shows that Russia is still focused on taking full control of the Donetsk region.
Zelenskiy’s comments came a day after he told Europeans that Russia was getting ready for “a decisive energy blow” in the coming cold months.
Moscow has blamed the energy outages on sanctions from the West and technical problems. European countries, which have helped Kyiv diplomatically and militarily, have said that Russia is using energy supplies to make weapons.
Some analysts say that the shortages and rising costs of living as winter approaches could hurt Western support for Kyiv while the government tries to calm down angry people.
Last week, Moscow said it would close the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which is its main way to send gas to Germany. At the same time, the G7 countries said they would put a price cap on oil exports from Russia.
The Kremlin said that it wouldn’t sell oil to countries that agreed to the cap.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday that his government had been planning to stop all gas deliveries in December. He promised to take steps to lower prices and tie social benefits to inflation.
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At a news conference in Berlin, Scholz said, “Russia is no longer a reliable energy partner.”
In response, Dmitry Medvedev, who used to be President of Russia, said that Germany was an enemy of Russia. “In other words, it has declared a hybrid war against Russia,” he said.
On Sunday, Finland and Sweden said they would give billions of dollars to power companies to keep them from going bankrupt because of the crisis.
Separately, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said that John Sullivan, the ambassador appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2019, had left his job and was retiring. A person from the State Department said that Sullivan had served a normal length of time.
Eyes on Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant
After U.N. inspectors said on Saturday that the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine had again lost power from the outside, Russian officials said everything was fine.
The plant is in the city of Energodar, which has a curfew. On Monday, the official Russian news agency TASS said that three loud explosions were heard there, but there were no immediate reports of damage or deaths.
It said that Ukrainian troops tried to set up assault teams near the city twice, and that they did so using drones, heavy artillery, and rocket launchers.
The last main power line from the outside was cut off, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that a reserve line kept power going to the grid.
It said that only one of its six reactors was still running.
Soon after President Vladimir Putin sent his army across the border on February 24, Russian troops came and took over the plant. It has become the centre of the fight. Each side has said that the other is to blame for the shelling that has made people worry about a nuclear disaster.
Vladimir Rogov, a pro-Russian official in the Zaporizhzhia region, told the radio station Komsomolskaya Pravda that there had been no shelling or incursions and that IAEA experts were expected to work at the plant until at least Monday.
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Last week, a group from the IAEA went on a tour of the plant, which is still run by Ukrainian workers. Some experts have stayed there until an IAEA report comes out.
Russia has ignored calls from around the world to stop arming the area.
On other battlefronts, Ukrainian Telegram channels said there were explosions near the city of Kherson at the Antonivsky bridge, which was occupied by Russian forces.
Over the past few weeks, Ukrainian missiles have done a lot of damage to the bridge, but Russian troops were working to fix it or set up a pontoon crossing or barges so they could keep supplying their troops on the right bank of the Dnieper River.