The Latest Breaking News from Marko Djurica

Barely a kilometre from Russian positions defending the captured eastern city of Izium, Ukrainian and foreign fighters hunker in a dank basement. Artillery rains down on them most nights, shaking loose the plaster and filling the air with dust.

In the last specialist maternity ward still under Ukrainian control in the eastern Donbas region, the windows are packed with sandbags. Rooms used for births at the Perinatal Centre in the city of Pokrovsk follow the two-wall rule, which says the safest parts of a building are separated from the…

Ukraine has so far staved off any major Russian advance into the north of its Donetsk region, but pressure is intensifying with heavy shelling on the city of Sloviansk and nearby populated areas, the Ukrainian military said on Wednesday.

Since Sievierodonetsk fell to Russian troops Ukrainian volunteer Eduard Skoryk has been getting more calls to evacuate frail and elderly people from Bakhmut, 70 km away, who fear their city in eastern Ukraine may be next.

In a siege similar to the Mariupol steelworks, hundreds of Ukrainian civilians are believed to have taken shelter inside a chemical plant in the Luhansk region.

Up to 1,200 civilians may be holed up in the shelters of the Azot chemical plant in the eastern Ukrainian city where one of the fiercest battles of the war has been raging between Russian and Ukrainian forces, a Russian-backed separatist said.

The Russian national anthem was played in Belgrade on Monday as hundreds of Serbians, including senior government officials, assembled for Victory Day, showing the political strain of a country long aligned with Moscow but now trying to join the EU.

The names of the dead are scrawled on the peeling wall of a school basement where residents say more than 300 people were trapped for weeks by Russian occupiers in Yahidne, a village north of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

The burnt wreckage of two Russian tanks with blown off turrets and several armoured personnel carriers attest the ferocity of last week's clashes in Lukyanivka village just outside Kyiv. The charred corpse of a Russian soldier lies in a field nearby.