Putin visits two regions in Ukraine as G7 condemn nuclear plan
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited security forces in parts of Ukraine that Russia says it annexed last year, as Group of Seven foreign ministers meeting in Japan condemned a Russian plan to station nuclear weapons in Belarus.
The Kremlin said Putin visited the Kherson and Luhansk regions, attending a military command meeting in the former and visiting a national guard headquarters in the latter.
The Kremlin did not say when he made the visits.
In Kherson, in the south, he heard reports from commanders of the airborne forces and the “Dnieper” army group as well as other senior officers who briefed him on the situation in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the south.Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk, in the east, are three of the four regions that Putin proclaimed annexed last September.
Ukraine and its Western allies rejected the annexations and Russian forces only partly hold the regions.
Russian troops retreated from the city of Kherson, the regional capital, last November, and have been reinforcing their positions on the opposite bank of the Dnipro river in anticipation of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
