American tire depot

• Russian has launched a long-feared offensive against Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region , starting what could become the pivotal battle of the war

• I n Kharkiv, local authorities said a man and a woman died in the latest shelling to hit Ukraine’s second city

• Volodymyr Zelensky said that 18 people had been killed and 106 injured by Russian bombardment of Kharkiv in the past four days

• Residents of Vasylkiv, a town south of the capital of Kyiv that is home to a military air base, reported a large explosion on Monday morning

• Russian missiles also hit Lviv, killing at least seven people, according to its regional governor.

• The Pentagon announced four flights of US weapons have arrived in Ukraine since Joe Biden, the US president, authorised the latest $800 million in military assistance last week

U krainian media has reported a series of explosions along the front line in the Donetsk region, with shelling taking place in Marinka, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk.

Ukrainian officials and local media also claimed that further explosions were heard in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv in the south and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.

S erhiy Haidai, governor of the Donetsk region, said Russian forces had taken control of the villages of Kremenaya and Lugashchnine, both northwest of the town of Severodonetsk, Roland Oliphant, Joe Barnes and Jamie Johnson write .

“Evacuation from there is already impossible,” Mr Haidai wrote on Telegram early in the morning.

Residents of Luhansk were warned that this was their last chance to evacuate.

The Kremlin said it would concentrate on “liberating” the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the mainly Russian-speaking regions where war first broke out in 2014, after retreating from Kyiv at the end of March.

Read more: Russia launches major offensive in Donbas

R ussia has begun dropping bunker-buster bombs on a Mariupol steel plant where Ukrainians are refusing to surrender, the commander of the Azov Regiment of the National Guard said Monday.

Denys Prokopenko, whose soldiers have been holding out against Russian forces in the key southern port city, said in a video message that the bombs are dropping even though civilians are sheltering in the plant’s tunnels.

“Russian occupational forces, and their proxy… know about the civilians, and they keep willingly firing on the factory,” he said.

‘Bunker-buster’ bombs are designed to hit targets buried underground or penetrate armour and reinforced structures.

The head of the city’s patrol police, Mikhail Vershinin, told Mariupol television on Sunday that many civilians including children are hiding in the plant, seeking shelter from Russian shelling and forces occupying other parts of the city.

Ukraine estimates that 21,000 people have been killed in Mariupol.

S erhiy Haidai, the regional governor of eastern Lugansk, said four people died as they tried to flee the city of Kreminna, which Russian forces captured on Monday.

“Kreminna is unfortunately under the control of the orcs,” he said, using a pejorative term to refer to Russian troops.

However, Oleksiy Arestovich, a presidential adviser, said Russian forces had not conquered Kreminna.

“Intense street fighting is unfolding there,” he was quoted as saying by the television channel Ukraina 24.

G ood evening. Russia has begun its massive offensive in eastern Ukraine, targeting the Donbas region.

Mr Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak has called it “the second phase of the war” and assured Ukrainians that their forces could hold off the offensive. “Believe in our army, it is very strong,” he said.

Russian shelling killed at least eight civilians in eastern Ukraine today, according to local authorities.

T wo British citizens captured by Russian forces in Ukraine have been paraded on Russian state television appealing to Boris Johnson to exchange them for a close friend of Vladimir Putin held in Ukraine, reports Roland Oliphant .

Sean Pinner and Aiden Aslin, who are members of Ukraine’s 36th Marine brigade , asked Mr Johnson to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky to swap them for Viktor Medvedchuk in a report broadcast on Russia’s lunchtime news program.

The videos were released at the same time as the SBU, Ukraine’s security service, released a video of Mr Medvedchuk appealing to Vladimir Putin to exchange him for soldiers and civilians in Mariupol.

It was not clear how freely the men were able to speak. They spoke hesitantly and when prompted, and at least one of them was in handcuffs.

Read the full story here.

R ussian troops have captured the east Ukraine town of Kreminna, local authorities said, as Kyiv’s armed forces launched salvos on Russian forces in the nearby settlement of Rubizhne.

“There was a major attack in the night” in Kreminna, the Luhansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said in a statement on social media.

“The Russian army has already entered there, with a huge amount of military hardware … Our defenders have retreated to new positions,” he added.

Kreminna, with a pre-war population of nearly 20,000 people is around 50 kilometres (31 miles) northeast of Kramatorsk, the region’s administrative centre, and is a strategic target for invading Russian forces.

R ussian shelling in Kharkiv killed three people today, a day after bombardment claimed six lives in Ukraine’s second largest city.

Officials said one shell fell on a children’s playground and killed a man and a woman.

The head of a medical emergency centre, Viktor Zabashta told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency that another strike on a humanitarian aid distribution point killed one person and injured six more.

A Ukrainian mayor described hours of “hard” interrogations when held for almost a week by Russian forces last month and said he had appealed to the Pope for help to stop a war that had wrecked swathes of his city in southern Ukraine.

“It was a dangerous six days because I understood that for Russians my life and the lives of civilians were worth zero,” said Ivan Fedorov, mayor of Melitopol which is now under Russian control, in an interview in Rome a month after his release.

Ukraine said Mr Fedorov was abducted on March 11 after Russian forces seized Melitopol, which lies west of the besieged city of Mariupol in a southern region that Russia seeks to control.

Kyiv announced Mr Fedorov’s release in a prisoner exchange on March 16.

S erbian President Aleksandar Vucic accused Ukraine and an unidentified EU country of being behind a series of hoax bomb threats against Air Serbia planes.

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in late February, more than a dozen Air Serbia flights have been forced to return to Belgrade or Moscow due to bomb threats, and Belgrade’s airport was evacuated at least three times.

“Foreign (intelligence) services of two countries are doing that. One is an EU country, and Ukraine is the another one,” Mr Vucic said, without providing evidence.

In a statement, Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, dismissed Mr Vucic’s remarks as “baseless” and “untrue”.

U kraine called for Russia to facilitate a humanitarian corridor for evacuees from the besieged port of Mariupol and one from the steelworks that is the city’s last significant area of Ukrainian resistance.

“We demand an urgent humanitarian corridor from the territory of the Azovstal plant for women, children and other civilians,” Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a post on the Telegram messaging service.

T he situation in Ukraine’s southeastern port of Mariupol is “extremely difficult” but the city has not been taken under full control by Russian forces, a spokesman for Ukraine’s defence ministry said today.

Speaking at a media briefing, spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk also said that bombing runs by Russian military aircraft had increased of late by over 50 per cent and that Ukraine’s infrastructure had come in for increased targeting.

R ussian President Vladimir Putin held a phone call with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas about negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, the Kremlin said today.

They also talked about “the problems of the Middle East settlement in the context of escalating tensions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem”, the Kremlin said.

V ladimir Putin said that Western countries had harmed themselves by imposing sanctions against Russia over Ukraine which he said had led to a “deterioration of the economy in the West”.

Speaking on the state of Russia’s domestic economy, the Russian President said that inflation was stabilising and that retail demand in the country had normalised.

Western countries have imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia’s corporate and financial system since it sent troops into Ukraine on February 24.

Russia’s foreign ministry said that it had declared some employees of the Bulgarian embassy in Moscow “personae non grata” in retaliation for Sofia’s decision to expel 10 Russian diplomats in March.

T he move was announced in a brief statement which did not say how many Bulgarians were being told to leave.

I taly has reopened its embassy in Kyiv, becoming the latest country to return diplomats to the Ukrainian capital after Russian troops withdrew from the region.

Italy had moved its diplomats to the western city of Lviv after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.

But after Russia withdrew its forces from around the capital and northern Ukraine, ahead of an expected assault on the east of the country, diplomatic missions have been trickling back to the city.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said this morning that Madrid would reopen its embassy in the “coming days” after staff were relocated to Poland.

M ore than 4.9 million Ukrainians have fled their country following the Russian invasion, the UN said today as it warned of the risks of women and child refugees being exploited.

UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, said 4,934,415 Ukrainians had left the country since Russia invaded on February 24 – a figure up 65,396 on Sunday’s total.

The UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says nearly 215,000 third-country nationals – largely students and migrant workers – have also escaped to neighbouring countries, meaning more than five million people in all have fled Ukraine since the war began.

U krainian troops defied a Russian ultimatum to surrender the strategic port city of Mariupol on Sunday, as Kyiv insisted fighting was continuing in the streets despite Moscow’s claim that resistance was confined to a single steel plant.

The last remaining fighters in the area, who have faced more than seven weeks of bombardment, refused to “lay down their arms”, according to Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the city’s mayor.

“Our defenders are still standing,” he said.

“The occupiers may want to make it look like the hostilities are contained to [steel plant] Azovstal but this is not the case,” he added, insisting that there was fighting in areas miles from the factory.

Despite Mariupol being without power, water , communications or medical supplies, Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine’s prime minister, insisted it had “not fallen”.

Read the full story here.

R ead: A mother’s anguish as British fighter Aiden Aslin captured by Russians in Ukraine

A n unidentified man on Russian state TV was seen showing the two Britons a video of the wife of the captured pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk making an appeal over the weekend for her husband to be swapped for the two British nationals.

“I understand the situation,” said Shaun Pinner, who looked tired and nervous, after being shown the video.

“I’d like to appeal to the government to send me back home, I’d like to see my wife again,” he added.

Mr Pinner made a direct appeal to Boris Johnson on his and Aiden Aslin’s behalf.

“We look to exchange myself and Aiden Aslin for Mr Medvedchuk. Obviously I would really appreciate your help in this matter,” he said, saying he spoke a little Russian and had been treated well.

The unidentified Russian man was then shown speaking to Mr Aslin, who was sat on a chair wearing a T-shirt bearing the emblem of Ukraine’s far-right Azov battalion.

“I think that Boris needs to listen to what Oksana [Viktor Medvedchuk’s wife] has said,” said Mr Aslin, who also looked nervous.

“If Boris Johnson really does care about British citizens like he says he does then he will help.”

A t the cemetery on the outskirts of the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro , six rows of 23 graves are pre-dug and awaiting the soldiers slain by Russia’s invasion. Another seven rows have already been filled.

After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, gravediggers created a new military section in the graveyard, using a backhoe to prepare nearly 300 new graves in anticipation of the casualties that would soon pour in from the eastern front.

That over half of these graves are already full, after just seven weeks of war, offers a graphic illustration of the mounting cost of resisting the Russian invasion .

Roughly 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far, according to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. But Russia claims that over 23,000 Ukrainian service members have been killed.

Read the full story here.

U krainian security services have published a video showing Viktor Medvedchuk, a detained pro-Russia Ukrainian tycoon and politician, calling to be exchanged for Ukrainian forces fighting in the besieged port city of Mariupol.

“I want to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to exchange me for Ukrainian defenders and residents of Mariupol,” he said in the video, wearing black clothes and looking directly into the camera.

T wo British fighters captured in Ukraine by Russian forces appeared on Russian state TV today asking to be exchanged for a pro-Russian politician who is being held by the Ukrainian authorities.

It was unclear how freely the two men – Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin – were able to talk. Both spoke after being prompted by an unidentified man.

Both asked Boris Johnson to help bring them home in exchange for Ukraine releasing pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk.

A build-up of wagons at border crossings and closures during the Easter holidays have prompted Ukraine to temporarily restrict goods supplies to Poland and Romania by rail, a senior representative of the Ukrainian railways said.

Ukraine, a major agricultural producer, used to export most of its goods through seaports, but since Russia’s invasion has been forced to export by train via its western border.

State-run railway company Ukrzaliznytsia imposed restrictions from April 16 to April 18 to Romania through the Dyakovo and Vadul-Siret crossings and to Poland through Yahodyn and Izov, the deputy director of its commercial department Valerii Tkachov said.

The restrictions had been implemented “due to the accumulation of a large number of wagons in the direction of western crossings and appeals from Western partners to reduce the delivery of freight trains”, he said.

T he Kremlin has accused Kyiv of constantly changing its stance during peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

“Contacts continue at an expert level within the framework of the negotiation process”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.

“Unfortunately the Ukrainian side is not consistent in terms of the points that have been agreed”, he said.

“It is often changing its position and the trend of the negotiating process leaves much to be desired.”

B oris Johnson has said it is “vital that friends stick together” ahead of his trip to India this week, reports Dominic Penna .

The Prime Minister will travel to India as he seeks to strengthen defence ties with the country, while leading international efforts to reduce reliance on Russia .

Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, has faced criticism after he refused to denounce Vladimir Putin , the Russian president, and spoke to him several times in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.

India has also abstained from multiple UN Security Council votes on the conflict and is yet to strongly criticise the Kremlin or impose economic sanctions .

Read the full story here.

A round 200,000 people risk losing their jobs in the Russian capital because foreign companies have suspended operations or decided to leave the Russian market, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said today.

Moscow authorities are ready to support people who lose their jobs by providing training and temporary work, Mr Sobyanin wrote on his blog.

F our civilians were shot dead while trying to flee by car from the town of Kreminna in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region during a Russian attack, regional governor Serhiy Gaidai said on Monday.

Another person was seriously injured, he added.

The information has not yet been independently verified.

#Lviv one hour ago. At least 5 #Russia missiles hit the Western city. Train station and storage units were targeted. pic.twitter.com/rzMEbcs70z

— Lesia Vasylenko (@lesiavasylenko) April 18, 2022

R ussia said it launched mass strikes overnight on the Ukrainian military and associated military targets, using its air force, missile forces, artillery and air defence systems to hit hundreds of targets.

The Russian defence ministry said in a statement that air-launched missiles had destroyed 16 Ukrainian military facilities overnight, including five command posts, a fuel depot and three ammunition warehouses, as well as Ukrainian armour and forces.

It said those strikes took place in the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and in the port of Mykolayiv, and that the Russian air force had launched strikes against 108 areas where it said Ukrainian forces and armour were concentrated.

In other areas, the defence ministry spoke of destroying 12 Ukrainian strike drones and tanks and of using Iskander missiles to destroy four arms and equipment depots in the Luhansk, Vinnytsia and Donetsk regions.

U kraine and Russia have failed to agree about humanitarian convoys for the evacuation of civilians from war-affected areas for the second day, Ukraine’s deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.

“For security reasons, it was decided not to open humanitarian corridors today,” Ms Vereshchuk said.

T he pictures appear to show the Russian flagship, the Moskva, being hit by Ukrainian missiles, despite the Kremlin’s claims that the ship sank because of “choppy waters”.

The mother of an anonymous conscript on the ship told Novaya Gazeta, a Russian investigative media outlet, that the strike had led to dozens of deaths and that the Kremlin refuses to admit this “because the Ministry of Defence does not want to admit defeat on the part of Ukraine”.

It took the Russian military almost a day to admit the embarrassing loss of the pride of its Black Sea fleet after it was hit in the early hours of Thursday, initially insisting that it had caught fire after an explosion and was being towed back to land.

The Kremlin later admitted the Moskva, one of the navy’s three main missile carriers, had sunk, but said it was due to “choppy waters” and occurred while it was being towed to safety.

The US has since confirmed that the warship was hit by two Ukrainian strikes, believed to be Neptune anti-ship missiles.

U nder the candlelight of the St Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery, hundreds of Ukrainians prayed for their loved ones and their country, reports Danielle Sheridan in Kyiv.

Not even the mayor of Kyiv’s warning to stay away from the capital due to a rise in Russian attacks could stop people marking the start of Holy Week, which this year begins a week later in the Orthodox calendar than in the West.

Outside the cathedral it was snowing, creating a sense of calm amid the anxiety that had gripped Kyiv over the weekend, as Russia pummelled Ukrainian cities with high precision, long-range missiles.

“God is with Ukraine, so it is clear we will win,” said Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as he led the Palm Sunday service.

Read the full story here.

S pain will reopen its embassy in Kyiv in the coming days, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in an interview with the Antena3 TV network today.

The Spanish embassy in Ukraine’s capital was evacuated on February 24 when Russian troops invaded the country.

The move comes after several other European countries, including France, recently announced they would move back their embassies to Kyiv.

R ussia’s defence ministry said on Monday it had destroyed four arms and military equipment depots in Ukraine overnight with Iskander missiles, the Russian news agency TASS reported.

Russian forces had hit 315 Ukrainian targets in total overnight, TASS cited the ministry as saying