Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky has escaped serious injury after he was involved in a car crash, his spokesman has confirmed.
A motorist collided with a vehicle carrying the president as his motorcade passed through Kyiv.
A spokesman for Zelensky said the president was not seriously injured.
"In Kyiv, a passenger car collided with the car of the President of Ukraine and escort vehicles," spokesman Sergiy Nikiforov said in a statement.
"Medics accompanying the President provided the driver of the passenger car with emergency aid and transferred him to an ambulance.
"The president was examined by a doctor, no serious injuries were detected. The law enforcement officers will investigate all the circumstances of the accident."
Zelensky's nightly televised address was aired shortly after the crash. In it, he said he had just returned from near Kharkiv, where he had earlier watched his country's flag rise above the recaptured city of Izium.
It was 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 troops 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.
"Our blue-yellow flag is already flying in de-occupied Izium. And it will be so in every Ukrainian city and village," Zelensky said on social media during the visit to the city of Izium.
"We are moving in only one direction — forward and towards victory."
- news.com.au, AP
He has warned if a ceasefire is not respected more sanctions will be imposed.