Ukraine says troops fighting near Kharkiv advanced all the way to the Russian border

• Ukraine said Monday that troops fighting for the city of Kharkiv reached the Russian border.
• Kharkiv's mayor said Russia was scaling back attacks after failing for months to seize the city.

Ukrainian forces fighting for the city of Kharkiv advanced all the way to the Russian border, the city's mayor said Monday.

The claim would represent a humiliation for Russia's forces, which took the territory around Kharkiv in the early days of its invasion. It then spend months trying without success to seize the city, the second-largest in Ukraine.

In a video posted to Telegram by Mayor Oleh Sinegubov, a group of grinning Ukrainian troops are seen posing by a sign post covered in blue and yellow, the colors of the country's flag, while flashing "V for Victory" hand signs.

"We are here! We are at the border!" the soldiers are heard saying. The video was first released by Ukraine's defense ministry on Sunday. The exact location of the soldiers could not be immediately verified.

Alongside the video, Sinegubov wrote: "Defenders of Kharkiv region reached the state border of Ukraine. We are proud of the soldiers of the 227th battalion of the 127th brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who restored the border sign on the state border section!"

Kharkiv was one of Russia's main targets when President Vladimir Putin decided to abandon an the assault on Kyiv, the capital, and focus on the eastern region of Ukraine.

However, as of Monday, evidence suggested that Ukraine was close to winning the battle for Kharkiv. Ukraine's defense ministry said Saturday that Russian troops were now withdrawing from around the city.

In a follow up post on Telegram, Sinegubov wrote Monday that "the Russian occupiers have significantly reduced the intensity of shelling in Kharkiv thanks to our Armed Forces."

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the valor of Ukrainian forces in his regular address Sunday night, and said the West now needs to cut itself off from Russian oil.

"Now the priority is the oil embargo. No matter how hard Moscow tries to disrupt this decision, the time of Europe's dependence on Russian energy resources is coming to an end," he said.

The foreign ministers of EU nations were scheduled to meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss new measures against Russia.

The EU moved to ban imports of Russian oil in March, but Hungary refused to support the measure. All EU states have to agree in order to adopt the ban.

Germany, the bloc's largest economy, pledged to ban Russian oil regardless of the EU's decision.