Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky paid a surprise visit on Wednesday to the newly recaptured town of Izium, a key logistics hub in the northeastern Kharkiv region, and thanked his army for their success in retaking territory from Russian forces.

Thousands of Russian troops fled Izium at the weekend, leaving behind large amounts of ammunition and equipment, in their worst defeat since they were driven back from the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in March. “It is probably possible to temporarily occupy the territory of our state. But it is definitely impossible to occupy our people, the Ukrainian people,” he said at a ceremony where the yellow and blue national flag was raised outside Izium’s charred city council. “Before, when we looked up, we always looked for the blue sky, the sun. And today we, and especially the people in the temporarily occupied territories, looking up, are looking for only one thing - the flag of our state. This means the heroes are here. This means the enemy is gone, they have fled.”