Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on the West to impose sanctions against Russia's nuclear industry in the wake of the fighting over the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.
Russia is using the nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine to frighten people and to blackmail the Ukrainian leadership and the whole world, Zelensky said in a video address broadcast on Saturday evening.
Russia, a nuclear power in terms of weaponry, is building nuclear power plants in several countries.
Kyiv and Moscow have been accusing each other for days of being responsible for the shelling of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.
Zelensky has accused Russian troops of using the Russian-occupied site as a fortress from which to fire on the small towns of Nikopol and Marhanez, which lie on the other bank of the Dnipro reservoir.
He warned that the deployment of Russian troops on the site of the nuclear power plant "increases the radioactive threat to Europe to a level that did not exist even at the most difficult moments of confrontation in the times of the Cold War."
Zelensky called for "a tough reaction" in the video.
Earlier on Saturday, Ukraine called on Western states for help to prosecute Russian war crimes committed during the invasion of the country.
Kyiv needed experts in military law and specialists in investigating war crimes to punish the Russian attackers, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a lengthy statement published on Facebook on Saturday.
The minister said had sent a corresponding request via the Foreign Ministry to the Ukraine Contact Group, which includes countries like the US, Britain and Germany and coordinates arms deliveries for the Ukrainian armed forces.
Reznikov also called for the establishment of "international groups that will help with the work on specific cases of Russian war crimes in Ukraine."
The defence minister stressed, in particular, the fate of Ukrainian prisoners of war, saying they were being tortured and killed on a large scale in Russian captivity.
"I have no doubt that after Ukraine's victory in this war we will, one way or another, catch all those involved in these barbaric killings and tortures," Reznikov wrote, asking that not only the perpetrators themselves but those giving orders and those who "justify those crimes" be prosecuted.
He also called for international experts to be granted access to a prison in Olenivka near the city of Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) were killed in an attack in late July.
"This crime, apart from the reaction of such institutions as the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, requires a decisive reaction of the United Nations," Reznikov said.
"It is the UN that must force Russia to allow Red Cross representatives to visit Ukrainian POWs in Olenivka."
Moscow and Kyiv have each blamed the other for the attack on the Olenivka prison.
Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February, a number of serious crimes against civilians have been made public for which Kyiv, and most of the international community, blame Moscow.
Among the most shocking incidents was the discovery of hundreds of corpses in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.
On the ground, the Russian position in southern Ukraine has been significantly weakened by Ukrainian counter-attacks on strategically important river crossings, according to British intelligence.
The two main road bridges on the Dnipro river can presumably no longer be used to transport significant military equipment to Russian-occupied areas west of the river, a British Ministry of Defence update said on Saturday.
The main railway bridge near Kherson is also reported to have been further damaged.
In order to organize military supplies, Moscow had recently relied mainly on a ferry connection near the bridge.
Even after further repairs, the bridges would probably remain a weak point of the Russian offensive. Supplies and provisions for thousands of Russian troops on the west side of the Dnipro depend on two temporary ferry connections, the intelligence report said.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began at the end of February, the British government has regularly published intelligence on its progress. Moscow accuses London of a targeted disinformation campaign.
