Zelenskyy flags damage in recaptured towns; Russia strikes key water system

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said towns and villages recaptured from Russian forces had been devastated, while a major city stepped up efforts on Thursday to repair damage to its water system from missile attacks. Kryvyi Rih, the largest city in central Ukraine with an estimated pre-war population of 650,000, was hit by eight cruise missiles on Wednesday, officials said.

The strikes hit the Karachunov reservoir dam, Zelenskyy said in a video address released early on Thursday. The water system had "no military value" and hundreds of thousands of civilians depend on it daily, he said.

Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the Krivyi Rih military administration, said in a post on Telegram that 112 homes were flooded but that works to repair the dam on the Inhulets river were under way and that "flooding was receding".

Zelenskyy meets with Accident

Zelenskyy's car collided with another vehicle early Thursday after a battlefield visit, but he was not seriously injured, his spokesman said. Zelenskyy was returning to Kyiv from the Kharkiv region, where he visited troops in the recaptured city of Izium. A passenger vehicle collided with the president's motorcade in the Ukrainian capital, his spokesman, Sergii Nikiforov, said in a Facebook post.