The Latest Breaking News from Kharkiv

Kharkiv (Ukraine) (AFP) - When Russian troops steamrolled through her east Ukrainian village in February, Elena Ivanovna's family packed their car before dawn and fled to Kharkiv, where they unwittingly found themselves on the front line.

Viacheslav Malyna, 83, and Zhanna Malyna, 81, fled Ukraine and are now living in Renfrewshire.

Russia resumed its assault on the last Ukrainian defenders holed up in a giant steel works in Mariupol on Saturday, days after Moscow declared victory in the southern city and said its forces did not need to take the plant.

Russia's defense ministry said on Friday that Ukrainian fighters and foreign mercenaries had been "securely blockaded" at the Azovstal steel plant where they have been holding out in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. President Vladimir Putin had ordered his defense minister on Thursday to block off the vast Azovstal complex…

Kharkiv is under an intensifying assault, which has left bodies of civilians in the streets where residents are trapped without power and water, and with little food.

Victor Gubarev stepped out to buy bread when he was killed by a fragment from a shell that landed in front of his apartment block in Kharkiv on Monday, minutes before his daughter arrived to find an ambulance crew standing over his body.

Ukraine's second-largest city Kharkiv was under intense bombardment on Thursday, its mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

Bosses at the Feldman Ecopark zoo in Kharkiv have called for those responsible to be punished for killing the workers, who stayed behind to feed the animals

Artist Pavlo Makov’s role representing Ukraine at the Venice Biennale has become an act of defiance against the Russian invaders, whose attacks on his adopted hometown of Kharkiv have grown more intense in recent days