Mariupol attacks

Russia renews attack on Mariupol and missiles hit Odesa, Ukraine says

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the country's army was not ready to try to break through the siege of the port city by force. But he told an evening news conference that Kyiv had every right to do so.

The attack on Mariupol has raged for weeks as Russia seeks to capture a city seen as vital to its attempts to link the eastern Donbas region with Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow seized in 2014. It has been the biggest battle of the conflict so far.

Moscow-backed separatists have held territory in the Donbas region for years.

Mariupol children bear the brunt of Vladimir Putin's war

He clutches a small yellow toy tractor but says nothing as specialist nurses monitor his condition. The Russian shell that blasted shrapnel into his belly also badly wounded his parents and grandparents as they tried to flee Mariupol. A victim of Putin's war and he's not yet three years old.

In the next bed to Artem lies 15-year-old Masha, also from near Mariupol. Her right leg was amputated after it was torn apart by the blast from a Russian shell last Tuesday.