US President Joe Biden will visit a Polish town near the border with Ukraine today, seeking to show Western resolve against Russia's invasion.
"NATO has never, never been more united than it is today," Biden said on Thursday after a NATO summit in Brussels. He also said NATO will "respond" if Russia uses chemical weapons in Ukraine.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky says there is a "real" threat that Moscow will use chemical weapons in his country, accusing Russia of having already used phosphorus bombs against civilians in an overnight attack on a Ukrainian village that killed at least four people, including two children.
Russia has also accused NATO member Poland, which neighbours Ukraine, of embarking on a "dangerous escalation" in tensions between Moscow and the West after Warsaw expelled 45 Russian diplomats for alleged espionage.
The United Nations human rights office said on Thursday that at least 1,035 people have been killed and 1,650 wounded in one month of war in Ukraine.
Here are the Highlights on the Ukraine-Russia War:
A senior US defence official told reporters that the Pentagon has seen indications of Russia sending troop reinforcements from "Georgia" to Ukraine to support its offensive in the Donbas region.
President Emmanuel Macron said Friday France was working with Turkey and Greece on a "humanitarian operation" to evacuate people from the devastated Ukrainian city of Mariupol under attack by Russian forces.
"We are going to work with Turkey and Greece to launch a humanitarian operation to evacuate all those who wish to leave Mariupol," Macron said after an EU summit in Brussels.
Western officials on Friday named seven Russian generals they said had so far been killed, and another who had been sacked, during the war in Ukraine.
The latest to die, Lieutenant General Yakov Rezanstev, was a commander of Russia's 49th Combined Arms Army in its southern military district, an official disclosed.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin's demand for Europe to pay for gas in rubles as he accused Moscow of trying to sidestep sanctions over its war on Ukraine.
Macron told journalists after an EU summit in Brussels that the Russian move "is not in line with what was signed, and I do not see why we would apply it".
President Emmanuel Macron said Friday France was working with Turkey and Greece on a "humanitarian operation" to evacuate people from the devastated Ukrainian city of Mariupol under attack by Russian forces.
"We are going to work with Turkey and Greece to launch a humanitarian operation to evacuate all those who wish to leave Mariupol," Macron said after an EU summit in Brussels.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that he was hoping to have more talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin "in the coming hours" regarding the situation in Ukraine and any plans to help people leave Mariupol.
Russian President Vladimir Putin Friday signed into law a bill introducing jail terms of up to 15 years for publishing "fake" information about Russia's actions abroad, as Moscow's troops continue their military operation in Ukraine.
The bill, adopted by Russia's parliament this week, sets out jail terms and fines for people who publish "knowingly false information" about actions abroad by Russian government agencies.
A huge plume of black smoke rose from a fuel storage facility in the village of Kalynivka outside Kyiv on Friday, AFP reporters saw, as Russia said it had destroyed the military site with Kalibr cruise missiles. Read here
Russian shelling hit a clinic that was acting as a centre for humanitarian aid in the eastern city of Kharkiv, killing four people, the regional police said in a statement on Friday.
"As a result of the morning shelling of civilian infrastructure from multiple rocket launchers, 7 civilians were injured, 4 of whom died," said a statement on social media. "There is no military facility nearby."
Reuters could not independently verify the report.
Germany said Friday it was drastically slashing its energy purchases from Russia amid Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, with oil imports to be halved by June and coal deliveries to end by the autumn.
"In recent weeks, together with all relevant players, we have made intensive efforts to import less fossil energy from Russia and broaden out our supply base," said Economy Minister Robert Habeck.
"The first important milestones have been reached to free us from the grip of Russian imports," he added.
The US and EU announced a task force Friday aimed at reducing Europe's reliance on Russian fossil fuels in the face of Moscow's war on Ukraine.
The initiative being unveiled by President Joe Biden and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen will see the US strive to help supply Europe with an extra 15 billion cubic metres of liquefied natural gas this year, a statement said.
Russian healthcare regulator Roszdravnadzor on Friday said medicine shortages were due to "artificially" higher demand and that suppliers were not currently able to replenish stocks on time, the RIA news agency reported.
Russians have rushed to stock up on anti-depressants, sleeping pills and contraceptives among other products since the conflict in Ukraine began, data released on Thursday showed, with people buying a month's worth of medicine in just two weeks.
About 20,000 people have answered appeals to flee the Ukrainian city of Boryspil, which is near an international airport, Boryspil Mayor Volodymyr Borysenko said on national television on Friday.
He urged others to evacuate, saying the large number of civilians in villages nearby made it difficult for Ukrainian troops to clear Russian forces from the area.
Boryspil international airport is about 30 km east of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
Russia's armed forces destroyed a major fuel depot outside Kyiv in a missile strike, Russia's defence ministry said on Friday.
Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told a briefing that the strike happened on Thursday evening, using Kalibr cruise missiles fired from the sea. Konashenkov said the depot was used to supply Ukraine's armed forces in the centre of the country.
Reuters was not able to independently verify Konashenkov's remarks.
Rescuers were searching for survivors among the debris on Friday after two missiles hit a Ukrainian military unit on the outskirts of the city of Dnipro, causing "serious destruction", regional governor Valentyn Reznychenko said on social media.
Ukraine hopes to open a safe corridor to evacuate civilians from the besieged city of Mariupol on Friday in private vehicles, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
A four-day mission to rescue a lion and a wolf from war-torn Ukraine had a happy ending with the two zoo animals "settling in well" in Romania, Tim Locks - the British war veteran who spearheaded the rescue op - has said. Read here.
Ukraine has re-occupied towns and defensive positions up to 35 kilometres east of Kyiv, helped by Russian forces falling back on overextended supply lines, Britain's defence ministry said on Friday.
Szymon Janiewski employed 10 Ukrainians at his small construction company in Poland until war broke out in their homeland.
"I no longer have any Ukrainian employee," the 40-year-old says. "They were my company's backbone."
The workers had gone to Ukraine in January to see their families. A month later, Russia invaded their country and they never returned.
Poland's construction sector is the most affected: It employed 480,000 foreigners before the war, and four in five were from Ukraine, according to Jan Stylinski, head of the Polish Association of Construction Industry Employers. But a quarter of the Ukrainians in Poland have left the country since the war started on February 24.
It is "foolish" to believe that Western sanctions against Russian businesses could have any effect on the Moscow government, Russian ex-president and deputy head of security council Dmitry Medvedev was quoted as saying on Friday.
The sanctions will only consolidate the Russian society and not cause popular discontent with the authorities, Medvedev told Russia's RIA news agency in an interview.
The West has imposed an array of sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, but one month into the war, the Kremlin says it will continue the assault until it accomplishes its goals of Ukraine's "demilitarisation and denazification".
Some of the sanctions have specifically targeted billionaire businessmen believed to be close to President Vladimir Putin.
Gold prices were set on Friday for a third weekly gain in four, as no material progress in Russia-Ukraine peace talks supported the safe-haven metal, although a spike in U.S. yields on fears of aggressive tightening measures dented bullion's appeal.
Spot gold was up 0.2% at $1,961.99 per ounce, as of 0332 GMT, hovering close to a more than one-week high scaled in the previous session, and adding nearly 2% so far this week. U.S. gold futures were flat at $1,963.40.
"I would assign the most recent gold gains to concerns about Ukraine starting to creep back in because we haven't had the kind of progress on talks that I think markets were hoping for around the beginning of the month," said Ilya Spivak, a currency strategist at DailyFX.
Russia is running out of precision guided munitions and it is more likely to rely on so-called dumb bombs and artillery, a senior Pentagon official said on Thursday.
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl speculated that he did not believe President Vladimir Putin wanted to have an all out conflict with NATO.
As US President Joe Biden gears up to visit a town in Poland near the border with Ukraine -- seeking to show Western resolve against Russia's invasion -- here are the 10 latest updates on the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine is employing face recognition technology to identify invading Russian troops killed on its soil, a complex and unprecedented avenue for software already seen as problematic, experts said Thursday.
The embattled nation uses details resulting from the process to try to track down and notify the families of the dead, in an act Ukraine says is aimed at piercing Russia's war information filter.
While this type of artificial intelligence could offer closure to families denied it by the fog of war or Kremlin secrecy, the potential for mistakes is considerable and consequential.
"If you're a Russian parent being informed that your child has been killed when it's not true, that gets into a complex ethical dilemma," said Jim Hendler, director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state.
US-based Clearview AI, often criticized by privacy advocates, says it gave Ukrainian officials free access to its service that matches images from the internet to pictures uploaded by users trying to identify someone.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has made it more of a strategic burden on China, a senior Pentagon official said on Thursday.
"I do think that there's a degree to which what Putin has done in Ukraine makes Russia much more of a strategic burden for Beijing than it was six weeks ago or six months ago," Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said.
In February, China and Russia declared a "no limits" partnership, backing each other over standoffs on Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the West.
Russia will emerge from the conflict in Ukraine weaker and more isolated, a senior Pentagon official said on Thursday.