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Reuters has a quick snap that Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has instructed the military to prioritise destroying Ukraine’s long-range missile and artillery weapons, according to a defence ministry statement.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has claimed that Russia is using the private military company Wagner in Ukraine to reinforce its frontline forces, but that losses they have sustained are likely to be impacting their effectiveness.

Russia has used private military company Wagner to reinforce front-line forces and to mitigate manning shortfalls and casualties.

Wagner has almost certainly played a central role in recent fighting, including the capture of Popasna and Lysyschansk. This fighting has inflicted heavy casualties on the group.

Rockets and missiles continue to pound Ukrainian towns amid fears of renewed Russian offensive

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

Mourners in central Ukraine have buried a four-year-old girl who was killed by a Russian missile strike in the city of Vinnytsia last week, as officials and analysts warned that Moscow’s operational pause of recent days had come to an end, signalling further death and pain to come.

Twenty-three people were killed in the attack, and one person is still missing.

At least 37 deaths across country since Thursday as residential areas appear to be targeted

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine on Friday evening, as the country braced itself for another string of intensified long-range missile strikes on cities and towns across the country.

At least 37 people have been killed in missile attacks since Thursday that appear to have targeted busy civilian areas and crowded buildings, a tactic Russia has repeatedly denied employing.

Head of national security council says ‘more and more civilian targets’ being hit, after deadly Vinnytsia attack

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

A top Ukrainian official has accused Russia of deliberately escalating its deadly attacks on civilian targets, after recent missile strikes including this week’s targeting of the crowded city centre of Vinnytsia, which killed 23 people, including three children.

Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, told the Guardian that monitoring of Russian strikes suggested an increased emphasis in recent weeks on terrorising Ukraine’s civilian population.

Moscow claims missile attack on civilian area was directed at building where Ukraine air force officials were meeting suppliers

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest updates

Russia has confirmed it carried out a missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, the latest in a string of deadly attacks on civilian areas, as worries in Ukraine grow that Russia is preparing a new assault in the east.

The Russian defence ministry claimed in a military briefing on Friday that Thursday’s cruise missile attack was directed at a building where top officials from Ukraine’s air forces were meeting foreign arms suppliers.

Ukraine says up to 70% of Russian missile attacks are deliberately inflicted on “peaceful” Ukrainian cities

Russian and pro-Russian Luhansk People’s Republic separatist forces claim to have entered the outskirts of Siversk in Ukraine’s Donbas, the UK Ministry of Defence has said.

Acknowledging that reports have not corroborated, the ministry said Russian forces have been slowly advancing westwards and probing assaults towards Siversk from Lysychansk to open a pathway onward to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

Bakhmut is likely to be the next objective, once Siversk is secured,” the report read.

The simple truth is that, as we speak, children, women and men, the young and the old, are living in terror.”