U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is in Ukraine to review progress on a deal to release the country’s grain exports, and strikes overnight pummeled Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Key developments
- The U.N. chief will meet the leaders of Ukraine and Turkey to address the nuclear threat from an escalation in fighting around the Zaporizhzhia plant in southern Ukraine. The U.N. atomic energy watchdog has warned of potential disaster and has been unable to visit the facility, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which Russia now controls.
- Guterres is also expected to visit a Black Sea port at the heart of the U.N.-backed grain deal, brokered in Turkey to alleviate rising hunger around the world. Ukraine’s port authority said the largest caravan yet will be loaded with wheat, corn and sunflower products for exporting, after a vessel carrying food aid for the Horn of Africa set sail.
- Ukraine is activating a unit under the command of its special forces to attack far behind Russian lines, its defense minister said in an interview. Kyiv hopes this will undermine Russia’s ability to hold the front lines in occupied territory ahead of a potential counteroffensive, he said. Explosions that rocked Russian targets in the Crimean Peninsula over the past week drew attention to the strategy as Ukrainian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Washington Post that special forces were responsible.
Battlefield updates
- Kharkiv had one of its “most tragic” nights in the war, the region’s governor said early Thursday after what he described as hours of Russian strikes that shook sleeping residents awake and battered their homes. Oleh Synyehubov said shelling in one part of the region killed seven people and injured 17 others. In a district of the city of the same name, a strike on a dormitory also killed two people and injured 18 more, he said.
- Dozens of rescuers worked through the night in Kharkiv to douse fires and clear the rubble of buildings, photos showed.As artillery fire on Kharkiv has ramped up, Human Rights Watch denounced the assault on the northeastern region this week. The New York-based group said it documented attacks on health-care facilities, homes and populated areas using explosive weapons and cluster munitions.
From our correspondents
An interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky:In an hour-long interview with The Post at the presidential office, its hallways lined with sandbags, Zelensky discussed U.S. warnings about Russia preparing to launch a full-scale invasion.
The Post has published a translated and lightly edited transcript of excerpts from the wide-ranging interview. Read the excerpts here, and find The Post’s months-long examination of the road to the war in Ukraine here.
In the interview, Zelensky defended his government’s response to U.S. intelligence warnings and said Western nations did not send his country the advanced weapons it needed before the war began.
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