Russian forces have taken over Ukraine’s second biggest power plant, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday, following an earlier claim by Russian-backed forces to have captured it intact.
Seizing the Soviet-era coal-fired Vuhlehirsk power plant in eastern Ukraine would be Moscow’s first strategic gain in more than three weeks in what it calls its “special operation” to demilitarise and “denazify” its neighbour.
“They achieved a tiny tactical advantage — they captured Vuhlehirsk,” adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said in an interview posted on YouTube.Russia was undertaking a “massive redeployment” of troops to three southern regions, Arestovych said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whose government describes Russia’s invasion as an unprovoked war of aggression, said on Wednesday that he planned a phone conversation with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov – the first between the two diplomats since before the start of the war.
