Ukrainian authorities fear up to 60 people sheltering in a school in Luhansk region may have been killed in a Russian strike on the building. It comes as the World Health Organisation announced it was collecting evident in Ukraine of possible war crimes committed by Russian forces against medical facilities.
Meanwhile the UK’s latest intelligence briefing confirms that Russia is sending more senior officers to the front lines to take command decisions, although it’s not clear whether this is having any impact to change battlefield strategies.
And the leaders of the G7 group are due to hold a video conference with President Zelenskyy on Sunday.
Follow events as they unfold in our Sunday live blog below, or click the video player above for the latest television news.
Sunday key points:
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Ukrainian authorities say up to 60 people who were among a group of 90 villagers sheltering in the basement of a school in Luhansk region are feared dead after Russian forces bombed the building.
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President Zelenskyy is due to meet with the leaders of G7 countries on Sunday via video link.
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The UK’s Ministry of Defence says Russia is increasingly sending more senior military leaders to the front lines to try and take better charge of the war effort — but that it’s not clear this has lead to any “refined or altered operational concept.”
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The World Health Organization is gathering evidence for a possible war crimes investigation into attacks it says it has documented by Russia on healthcare facilities in Ukraine
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All the civilian women, children and elderly people have now been evacuated from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant in the city of Mariupol but it is thought there are still Ukrainian military elements holding out against Russian forces.
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Russia has been putting its military might on display in Moscow, holding rehearsals ahead of Monday’s WWII Victory Day parade.
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Ukrainian refugees in France will be offered 400 hours of language lessons
Ukrainian refugees who arrive in France will be offered up to 400 hours of French language lessons.
The new scheme starts on Monday, and participants will first do an assessment of any existing written and spoken French skills they might already have.
“The organization offers training courses of one hundred or two hundred hours aimed at acquiring an A1 level”, which corresponds to an elementary mastery of the language, “one hundred hours of training aimed at acquiring an A2 level and one hundred hours of training aimed at acquiring a B1 level”, the official statement about the programme notes.
The ‘temporary protection’ status is open to Ukrainians or other foreign nationals who lived regularly in Ukraine before the start of the conflict, and lets them live legally in France, and benefit from a wide range of social benefits like accommodation allowances, access to unemployment benefits and health care.
At the end of April more than 70,000 Ukrainian had registered for an asylum seeker allowance according to the French Office for Immigration and Integration, which is responsible for setting up the language courses.
(AFP)
Ukraine warns of Moldova “full alert”
The Ukrainian military warned on Sunday that Russian and separatists troops are on “full alert” in neighbouring Moldova.
The region has increasingly become a focus of worries that the conflict could expand beyond Ukraine’s borders.
Pro-Russian forces broke off the Transnistria section of Moldova in 1992, and Russian troops have been stationed there since, ostensibly as peacekeepers.
Those forces are on “full combat readiness,” Ukraine said Sunday, without giving details on how it came to the assessment.
Moscow has sought to sweep across southern Ukraine both to cut off the country from the sea and create a corridor to Transnistria. But it has struggled to achieve those objectives.
(AP)
However the MoD says it’s not clear whether these deployments have led to “a refined or altered operational concept.”
“The forward deployment of commanders has exposed them to significant risk, leading to disproportionately high losses of Russian officers in this conflict. This has resulted in a force that is slow to respond to setbacks and unable to alter its approach on the battlefield,” the MoD said on Sunday morning.
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Emergency crew stands around near burning debris, after a school building was hit as a result of shelling, in the village of Bilohorivka,