A massive intercontinental missile was centre stage as the Russian military prepared for its Victory Day ceremony next month - by which time Vladimir Putin will want to be able to announce the 'success' of the Ukraine invasion.
Ukraine has announced that Russia is starting a new offensive in the east of the country with explosions along the front lines as well as attacks in other regions on Monday.
At the same time in Russia, thousands of soldiers took part in a rehearsals for the Victory Day ceremony, to be held on May 9, when Putin has reported to have wanted his forces to have dealt a telling blow in Ukraine.
As well as the soldiers, tanks and other military hardware, it was the intercontinental ballistic missile that stood out at the rehearsals. It was a show of force and a reminder of what is at stake as tensions continue to simmer between Russia and the West.
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The RD-24 missile launcher is able to send up to ten nuclear warheads to targets in Europe or the United States simultaneously.
Putin's offensive in Ukraine is understood to have taken far longer than the warmongering president expected, as the nation's forces dig in to frustrate and repel a Russian army that has at times appeared lacking in morale and tactics.
The Victory Day event is staged each year in Russia to mark the defeat of Germany at the end of the Second World War, when Joseph Stalin’s forces fought out a long and arduous battle against the Nazis.
Now decades later and this year’s celebration will have added significance, coming during Russia’s shelling of Ukrainian cities in an attempt to force them into submission.
Earlier this month, Russia withdrew troops from the north of Ukraine and surrounding the capital Kyiv but it appears to have been a reorganising of forces, with new impetus to the invasion now starting in the east.
Russia suffered a humiliating blow with the sinking of its flagship in the Black Sea, the Moskva, last week, and since then it has been retaliating with heavy pounding of cities.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had begun the "Battle of Donbas" in the east on Monday and a "very large part of the entire Russian army is now focused on this offensive."
"No matter how many Russian troops they send there, we will fight. We will defend ourselves," he vowed in a video address.
Zelensky's chief of staff Andriy Yermak 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.
Ukrainian media reported a series of explosions, some powerful, along the front line in the Donetsk region, with shelling taking place in Marinka, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk.
Ukrainian local officials and local media also said explosions were heard in Kharkiv in the northeast of Ukraine, Mykolaiv in the south and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.
Ukrainian officials said Russian shelling killed four people in the Donetsk region on Monday, while a man and a woman were killed in Kharkiv when shells hit a playground near a residential building.
They said a Russian missile attack also killed seven people in Lviv, the first civilian victims in the western city about 40 miles from Poland.
Ukraine's top security official, Oleksiy Danilov, said Russian forces attempted to break through Ukrainian defences "along almost the entire front line of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions" on Monday morning.
Driven back by Ukrainian resistance in the north, Moscow has refocused its ground offensive in the two eastern provinces known as the Donbas, while launching long-distance strikes at other targets including the capital, Kyiv.
Donbas has been the focal point of Russia's campaign to destabilise Ukraine, starting in 2014 when the Kremlin used proxies to set up two separatist "people's republics" in the ex-Soviet state. It is also home to much of Ukraine's industrial wealth, including coal and steel.
Russia's defence ministry said it had hit hundreds of military targets in Ukraine overnight. It said air-launched missiles had destroyed 16 military facilities in the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and in the port of Mykolayiv, which are in south and east Ukraine.
It added that the Russian air force had launched strikes against 108 areas where Ukrainian forces were concentrated and Russian artillery struck 315 Ukrainian military targets.
