After nearly a week, Russia has yet to achieve its aim of overthrowing Ukraine's government.
Ukraine on Wednesday sharply raised the number of civilians killed to over 2,000 as it contested Russian claims of capturing the port of Kherson. Russia reported its first casualty figure, saying 498 troops had been killed so far.
Here are the 10 latest developments in this story:
- Russia said it had sent delegates for a second round of peace talks in Belarus that were due on Thursday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia must stop bombing if it wanted to negotiate.
- Russia said it had captured Kherson, a southern provincial capital of around 250,000 people strategically placed where the Dnieper River flows into the Black Sea.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's advisor Oleksiy Arestovych denied Kherson was fully under Russian control, saying: "The city has not fallen, our side continues to defend."
- In Ukraine's second-largest city Kharkiv - which Indians have been asked to evacuate at all costs by 6 pm local time - an airstrike on Wednesday morning brought down the roof of a police building. Russian paratroopers landed in the city, triggering clashes in the streets, Ukrainian forces said. Authorities said 21 people were killed by shelling and airstrikes in the city in the past 24 hours, and four more on Wednesday morning.
- Also in the south, Russia was bombarding the port of Mariupol, which it says it has surrounded in a ring around the entire Sea of Azov. The besieged city's mayor said Mariupol had suffered mass casualties after a night of intense strikes. He gave no full casualty figure but said it was impossible to evacuate the wounded.
- On the other two main fronts in the east and north, Russia so far has little to show for its advance, with Ukraine's two biggest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, holding out in the face of increasingly intense bombardment.
- In Kyiv, the capital of 3 million people where residents have been sheltering at night in the underground metro, Russia blasted the main television tower near a Holocaust memorial on Tuesday, killing bystanders.
- President Zelenskiy, in his latest update to his nation, said that attack proved the Russians "don't know a thing about Kyiv, about our history. But they all have orders to erase our history, erase our country, erase us all."
- Apple, Exxon, Boeing and other firms joined an exodus of international companies from Russian markets that has left Moscow financially and diplomatically isolated since President Vladimir Putin ordered the February 24 invasion.
- More than 2,000 civilians have been killed in the Russian attack which has destroyed hospitals, kindergartens and homes, according to the Ukrainian emergency service. Over 900,000 Ukrainians have fled the country since the assault began, Europe's fastest displacement of people for decades.
