The United Nations chief Antonio Guterres has expressed grave concern at the situation around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, warning any potential damage to the plant would be “suicide”.
Guterres called for the demilitarisation of Europe’s biggest nuclear plant, but his proposal was rejected by the Russian foreign ministry.
The UN secretary-general’s comments came after he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Lviv amid growing fears of a nuclear catastrophe.
Erdogan renewed his offer to act as a mediator. Turkey, along with the UN, has brokered a deal to allow the resumption of Ukrainian grain exports to address the global food crisis.
The UN wants to step up grain exports from Ukraine before winter, Guterres said.
The United States is preparing about $800m of additional military aid for Ukraine and could announce it as soon as Friday, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters
Russia is keeping up a steady bombardment of the northeastern Kharkiv front to tie down Ukrainian forces and prevent them from being used for counterattacks in other regions, Britain’s defence ministry said on Friday.
Seventeen people were killed and 42 wounded in two separate Russian attacks on Kharkiv, the regional governor said.
At least four explosions hit an area near the Russian Belbek military airport north of Sevastopol in annexed Crimea, three local sources said, but a pro-Moscow official said no damage had been done.
The inhabitants of two villages in southern Russia near the Ukrainian border were evacuated after a nearby ammunition storage depot caught fire, but no one was hurt, an official said.
