KYIV: Seven Russian rockets slammed into residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia before dawn on Thursday, killing at least ONE person and trapping at least five in the city close to Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant, the governor of the mostly Russian-occupied region said.

The strikes came just hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that the country’s military had retaken three more villages in one of the regions illegally annexed by Moscow.

Gov. Oleksandr Starukh wrote on his Telegram channel that many people were rescued from the multistory buildings, including a 3-year-old girl who was taken to a hospital for treatment. He initially reported two people were killed but later said that one woman initially thought to have died was saved by doctors.

Photos provided by emergency services showed rescuers scrambling through rubble in the wreckage of a devastated building.

Regional authorities reported another rocket attack later in the morning, but there were no immediate details of casualties or what was struck.

Zaporizhzhia is one of the four regions that Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed in violation of international laws on Wednesday, and is home to an atomic plant that is under Russian occupation. The city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.

The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog is expected to visit Kyiv this week to discuss the situation at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant after Putin signed a decree on Wednesday declaring that Russia was taking over the six-reactor facility. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called it a criminal act and said it considered Putin’s decree “null and void.” Ukraine’s state nuclear operator Energoatom said it would continue to operate the plant.

Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, plans to talk with Ukrainian officials about the Russian move. He will also discuss efforts to set up a secure protection zone around the facility, which has been damaged in the fighting and seen its staff, including its director, abducted by Russian troops.

He will travel to Moscow for talks with russian officials after a stop in Kyiv.

Meanwhile, leaders from more than 40 countries are meeting in the Czech Republic’s capital Prague on Thursday to launch a “European Political Community,” aimed at boosting security and prosperity across the continent, a day after the Kremlin held the door open for further land grabs in Ukraine.

Speaking in a conference call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “certain territories will be reclaimed, and we will keep consulting residents who would be eager to embrace Russia.”

Peskov did not specify which additional Ukrainian territories Moscow is eyeing, and he wouldn’t say if the Kremlin planned to organize more of the “referendums” in Ukraine that Kyiv and the West have dismissed as illegitimate.

The precise borders of the areas Moscow is claiming remain unclear, but Putin has vowed to defend Russia’s territory — including the annexed regions — with any means at his military’s disposal, including nuclear weapons.

In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy said the Ukrainian army recaptured three more villages in the Kherson region: Novovoskrysenske, Novohryhorivka and Petropavlivka.

Humiliating defeats

Ukrainian troops are taking back villages in Kherson in humiliating battlefield defeats for moscow’s forces that have badly dented the image of a powerful Russian military and added to the tensions surrounding an ill-planned mobilization. They have also fueled fighting among Kremlin insiders and left Putin increasingly cornered.

Also on Wednesday, the Ukrainian military said the Ukrainian flag had been raised above seven previously occupied villages in the Kherson region. The closest of the liberated villages to the city of Kherson is Davydiv Brid, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) away.

Yurii Sobolevskyi, deputy head of the Ukrainian regional government, said military hospitals were full of wounded Russian soldiers and that Russian military medics lacked supplies. Once they are stabilized, the troops will be sent to Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

When Russian forces pulled back from the city of Lyman in the annexed Donetsk region over the weekend, they retreated so rapidly that they left behind the bodies of their comrades. Some were still lying by the side of the road leading into the city on Wednesday.

Lyman sustained heavy damage both during the occupation and as Ukrainian soldiers fought to retake it.

In his nightly address, a defiant Zelenskyy switched to speaking Russian to tell the Moscow leadership that it has already lost the war that it launched on February 24.

“You have lost because even now, on the 224th day of full-scale war, you have to explain to your society why this is all necessary,” Zelenskyy said.

He also said Ukrainians knew what they were fighting for, adding that “more and more citizens of Russia are realizing that they must die simply because one person does not want to end the war.”