Ukraine is retaking several Russian-occupied cities in its counteroffensive, President Volodomy Zelenskyy announced in his nighly address to the nation on Sunday.
Reconquering Lyman is the biggest story in the media right now, but the strength of Ukrainian forces isn't limited to Lyman, Zelenskyy highlights.
"At least twice a day I receive reports from our military. This week, the reports have largely consisted of a list of settlements liberated from the enemy as part of our defence operation... But the successes of our soldiers are not limited to Lyman."
Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian forces have freed the settlements Arkhanhelske and Myrolyubivka in the Kherson region to the south of Ukraine.
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A Russian-installed official in Kherson confirmed Ukraine's advances to the south, Reuters reported on Monday. "Yes, there were indeed breakthroughs," the official told Russian state television.
What next for the conflict?
The speech came after Russian President Vladimir Putin conceded that "a lot of questions are being raised during this mobilisation campaign'" when addressing his National Security Council on 29 September. "We must promptly correct our mistakes and not repeat them," Putin said, according to reports from the British Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The MoD's daily war update added that Putin's "unusually rapid acknowledgement of problems highlights the dysfunction of the mobilisation over its first week."
On the question of nuclear weapons, former CIA director and general David Petraeus warned that NATO would respond if Putin were to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Petraeus stressed that he hadn't spoken to national security adviser Jake Sullivan about how the US would respond to Russian nuclear escalation but gave his highly qualified assumption to ABC News: "In this hypothetical scenario, the US would respond by leading a collective NATO effort that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea."
