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Zelenskyy in car accident after a battleground visit, but no serious injuries: Spokesperson

Zelenskyy was returning to Kyiv from the Kharkiv region

AP05_17_2022_000288B President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy | AP

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's car collided with another vehicle early Thursday after a battlefield visit, but he was not seriously injured, according to reports on Thursday. 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. The driver of the other vehicle received first aid from Zelenskyy's medical team and was taken away by ambulance, he said. Medics examined the president, who suffered no serious injuries, Nikiforov wrote. He did not specify what injuries Zelenskyy might have suffered.

 Zelenskyy watched his country's flag rise Wednesday above the recaptured city of Izium, making a rare foray outside the capital that highlights Moscow's embarrassing retreat from a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Russian forces left the war-scarred city last week as Kyiv's soldiers pressed a stunning advance that has reclaimed large swaths of territory in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region.

As Zelenskyy looked on and sang the national anthem, the Ukrainian flag was raised in front of the burned-out city hall. After almost six months under Russian occupation, Izium was left largely devastated, with apartment buildings blackened by fire and pockmarked by artillery strikes.

A gaping hole and piles of rubble stood where one building had collapsed.

"The view is very shocking, but it is not shocking for me," Zelenskyy told journalists, "because we began to see the same pictures from Bucha, from the first de-occupied territories the same destroyed buildings, killed people."

Bucha is a small city on Kyiv's outskirts from which Russian forces withdrew in March. In the aftermath, Ukrainian authorities discovered the bodies of hundreds of civilians dumped in streets, yards and mass graves. Many bore signs of torture.

Prosecutors said they so far have found six bodies with traces of torture in recently retaken Kharkiv region villages. The head of the Kharkiv prosecutor's office, Oleksandr Filchakov, said bodies were found in Hrakove and Zaliznyche, villages around 60 kilometers (35 miles) southeast of Kharkiv city.

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