The Latest Breaking News from Tass

Dmitri Kovtun was one of two men who a UK inquiry ruled had laced the former Russian spy’s tea with a rare radioactive substance in 2006.

Dmitry Kovtun, one of two Russian men accused by Britain of poisoning Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, has died of Covid-19 in a Moscow hospital, Tass news agency said on Saturday.

DNIPRO, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces desperately tried to block a complete Russian takeover of one of the country’s two eastern provinces Tuesday, with Russian troops clawing out incremental gains even as European leaders agreed to a partial oil embargo aimed at starving Moscow’s mammoth war machine.

A ‘terrible smell of death’ hangs over the outskirts of the eastern city of Severodonetsk

Ukraine said on Tuesday that Russia had taken control of most of the eastern industrial city of Sievierodonetsk, a bombed-out wasteland whose capture Moscow has made the principal objective of its invasion.

Russian forces have seized control of about a third of the Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk, but their assault was taking longer than they had hoped, according to a Moscow-backed separatist leader quoted in a TASS news agency report.

The Russian-controlled Ukrainian region of Kherson has begun exporting grain that was harvested last year to Russia, the TASS news agency cited a senior local official as saying on Monday.

A ship has entered the Ukrainian port of Mariupol for the first time since Russia completed its capture of the city to load metal and ship it east to Russia, TASS news agency reported on Saturday, in a move that Kyiv decried as looting.

A pro-Russian separatist leader in East Ukraine said that more than 5,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war were being held in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, TASS reported on Friday.