(Reuters) – Russia resumed its assault on the last Ukrainian defenders holed up in a giant steel works in Mariupol, a Ukrainian official said, days after Moscow declared victory in the southern port city and said its forces did not need to take the factory.
FIGHTING
* An artillery strike on the front line town of Zolote in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region killed two civilians and wounded two others, Governor Serhiy Haidai said.
* A missile struck infrastructure in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, the local authorities said in an online statement, without giving further details.
* Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had shot down a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet and destroyed three MI-8 helicopters at an airfield in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.
* Russian forces made no major gains in the last 24 hours, British military intelligence said.
DIPLOMACY
* Germany must do everything in its power to help Ukraine win the war against Russia but without endangering its own security and NATO’s defence capability, Finance Minister Christian Lindner said.
ORTHODOX CHURCH
* The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose backing for Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has dismayed many fellow Christians, said he hoped it would end quickly but again did not condemn it.
QUOTES
* “We are collecting all witness reports about war crimes in Ukraine relying on the experience we have as an institution that normally deals with…the voices of victims of the Second World War,” Mateusz Falkowski, deputy head of Berlin’s Pilecki Institute, which is dedicated to researching 20th century history including Nazi crimes in World War Two.
COMING UP
* U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday.
(Compiled by Frances Kerry)
