The Latest Breaking News from Mariupol

The head of the United Nations says Ukraine has become "an epicentre of unbearable heartache and pain", touring Kyiv on the same day Russian missiles hit the city for the first time in weeks.

Around 100 Ukrainian civilians were being evacuated from a ruined steel works in the city of Mariupol, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, after the United Nations had confirmed a "safe passage operation" was in progress there.

Mayor of the Ukrainian capital, Vitali Klitschko said that the blasts hit a central part of the city, forcing three people to be hospitalised.

Mariupol authorities sound the alarm over unsanitary conditions they say pose a "deadly danger" to the city's remaining residents.

Russia has fired two missiles into the Ukrainian capital Kyiv during a visit by the UN secretary-general, with one hitting the lower floor of a residential building and injuring at least three people, the city's mayor says.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said after talks in Kyiv on Thursday that his organisation was doing all it could to enable the evacuation of a steel plant where fighters and civilians are holed up in the city of Mariupol.

Moscow's offensive in eastern Ukraine gathered momentum as several areas came under heavy shelling Thursday, amid suspicions Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to score a major battlefield success in time for Victory Day, one of Russia's proudest holidays, on May 9. Ukrainian authorities reported intense Russian fire in the Donbas…

Towns along strategic frontline road linking Kharkiv to Izium are focus of attack, say officials

Russia is preventing wounded Ukrainian fighters being evacuated from a vast steel works in the southern city of Mariupol because it wants to capture them, the local governor said on Thursday.