Russia has carried out missile strikes across southern and eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials say, and some women and children were evacuated from a steel plant in the besieged city of Mariupol after sheltering there for more than a week.
Moscow has turned its focus toward Ukraine's south and east after failing to capture its capital, Kyiv, in a nine-week assault that has flattened cities, killed thousands of civilians and forced more than 5 million Ukrainian citizens to flee abroad.
Russia's forces have captured the town of Kherson in the south, giving them a foothold just 100 kilometres north of Russian-annexed Crimea, and have mostly occupied Mariupol, a strategic eastern port city on the Azov Sea.
Moscow declared victory in Mariupol on April 21, even as hundreds of Ukrainian troops and civilians took shelter underneath the Azovstal steel works.
The United Nations has urged an evacuation deal and, on Saturday, a Ukrainian fighter inside said some 20 women and children had made it out.
Mr Palamar said both Russia and Ukraine were respecting a local ceasefire, and that he hoped the evacuated civilians would be transferred to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia to the north-west.
Russia's RIA Novosti news agency reported on Saturday that 25 civilians —19 adults and six children — had been evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks, but gave no further details.
There was no confirmation from the UN about the evacuations.
Hundreds of Ukrainians remain inside the underground corridors of the steelworks, according to Ukrainian officials.
Ukraine has not said how many fighters are also in the plant, the only part of Mariupol not occupied by Russian forces, but Russia put the number at about 2,000.
An estimated 100,000 civilians remain in the city.
Russia says Ukraine shelled school, kindergarten
Russia's defence ministry accused Ukraine's forces of shelling a school, kindergarten and cemetery in the villages of Kyselivka and Shyroka Balka in the Kherson region, the Russian RIA news agency said on Sunday.
The ministry gave no further details.
There was no immediate response from Ukraine to the report, which Reuters could not independently verify.
Russia also reported more Ukrainian strikes on its territory.
Officials in the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine and Belarus, said air defences had kept out a Ukrainian aircraft, but the resulting shelling hit parts of a Russian oil terminal.
South of Bryansk, in Kursk, another border region, several shells were fired from Ukraine toward a Russian checkpoint, said the regional governor, Roman Starovoit, but with no casualties or damage.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for such incidents but it described a series of blasts in Russia's south on Wednesday as payback and "karma" for Moscow's invasion.
Odesa's main airport destroyed
To the west, in Odesa — which has, so far, been relatively unscathed in the war — a Russian missile launched from Crimea destroyed the main airport's runway, said Maksym Marchenko, the city's regional governor.
No one was hurt, he added.
Ukraine's military said the airport could no longer be used and Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, vowed in a late-night video address to rebuild the airport.
There was no comment on the strike from Moscow, whose forces have sporadically targeted Odesa, Ukraine's third-largest city.
Last week, eight people were killed in a Russian strike on the city, Ukrainian officials said.
Moscow's assault in the south is aimed, in part, at linking the area with Crimea as it pushes for complete control over Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
Parts of Donbas' two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, were already controlled by Russian-backed separatists before Moscow's February 24 invasion.
In his address, Mr Zelenskyy said Russia was "gathering additional forces for new attacks against our military in the east of the country" and "trying to increase pressure in Donbas".
Zelenskyy delivers message in Russian
During his nightly address, Mr Zelenskyy switched to speaking in Russian to urge Russian troops not to fight in Ukraine, saying even their generals expect that thousands more of them will die.
The president accused Moscow of recruiting new soldiers "with little motivation and little combat experience" so that units gutted earlier in the war can be thrown back into battle.
"Every Russian soldier can still save his own life," Mr Zelenskyy said. "It's better for you to survive in Russia than to perish on our land."
Ukraine exchanges prisoners with Russia
Meanwhile, Ukraine carried out a prisoner exchange with Russia on Saturday, with seven soldiers and seven civilians coming home, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a online post.
One of the soldiers was a woman who is five months' pregnant, she added.
She did not say how many Russians had been transferred.
The two nations have swapped prisoners several times during the conflict.
On Thursday, Russia handed over 33 Ukrainian soldiers, including 13 officers, in a different exchange, Ms Vereshchuk said.
Five of the troops exchanged on Thursday had been wounded, she said.
Russia 'stole thousands of tonnes' of grain
On Saturday, Ukraine's deputy agriculture minister said that Russian forces have stolen "several hundred thousand tonnes" of grain in areas the Russians occupy.
Speaking to Ukrainian national TV, Taras Vysotskiy expressed concern that most of what he said was 1.5 million tonnes of grain stored in occupied territory could have also been stolen by Russian forces.
"To date, we have confirmed the fact that several hundred thousand tonnes of grain crops were taken out of the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions," he said.
Ukraine is a major grain producer and the Russian invasion has curtailed exports, pushed up world grain prices and raised concerns about severe shortages.
Agriculture Minister Mykola Solskyi said grain theft had increased in the past two weeks.
"I, personally, hear this from many silo owners in the occupied territory," the ministry quoted Mr Solskyi as saying.
He said such a situation could create food supply problems in areas that are not controlled by the Russians.
The Kremlin denied Ukraine's allegations, saying it did not know where the information was coming from.
Ukraine's Agriculture Ministry gave no 2022 grain harvest forecast, while analysts see output at 41.4 million tonnes this year, compared to 86 million tonnes in 2021.
ABC/wires
