Two thousand Ukrainian troops thought to be trapped inside steelworks after civilian evacuation

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

Members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion trapped inside Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant have said they fear they will be killed if captured by Russian forces, as they pleaded with Ukrainian authorities to help arrange their extraction.

Speaking to the media from inside the besieged steelworks, an Azov commander and lieutenant, looking gaunt and pale, said they had defended the city for the people of Ukraine and the rest of the world and needed a third party to negotiate their exit whether by land or sea.

Rescue attempts impossible due to constant shelling in Bilohorivka, says Luhansk governor

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest updates

Sixty people are feared to have been killed after a village school in eastern Ukraine took a direct hit in a Russian air raid, with rescue attempts said by the regional governor to be impossible due to constant shelling.

Russian attacks in the east and south intensified at the weekend ahead of Monday’s symbolic Victory Day celebrations, with the Black Sea city of Odesa coming under repeated missile strikes and the remaining Ukrainian fighters in the Azovstal steelworks in the besieged port city of Mariupol staging a press conference on Sunday saying they had been “abandoned” by the government as Russian attacks continued

Drone attack at Snake Island results in apparent destruction of landing craft as counter-offensive in north gathers pace

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

The Ukrainian port city of Odesa was hit by renewed Russian missile strikes on Saturday, as military authorities in Kyiv claimed one of their drones had sunk a second Russian ship in the Black Sea.

A counter-offensive against Russia also appeared to be gathering pace in the north, where analysts said that Ukraine’s military may be able to push Russian forces out of artillery range of the country’s second city of Kharkiv in the coming days.

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Russia’s defence ministry said that its missiles destroyed a large ammunition depot in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk.

Reuters reports it also said its air defences shot down two Ukrainian warplanes, an Su-25 and a MiG-29, in the eastern Luhansk region.

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Russia’s RIA news agency is carrying additional details from Moldova’s unrecognised breakaway Transnistria region, which claimed earlier this week to have foiled a drone attack it says originated within Ukraine. Transnistria borders Ukraine to the west.

The report quotes Transnistria’s foreign minister Vitaly Ignatiev saying:

The red increased terrorist threat code remains. We managed to neutralise the drone that flew with explosives in the direction of the Mayak radio and television centre. We minimised this threat, but the danger of terrorist attacks remains

The drone that was neutralized, we were able to track the tracking of its movements, and everything suggests that it was launched from the territory of Ukraine , six kilometres from the border of Transnistria

Leader of Ukrainian forces says they are engaged in ‘difficult bloody battles’ against Russian troops, as another 344 civilians are evacuated

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

Fierce fighting has continued inside Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, the commander of Ukrainian forces in the plant said, as more civilians fled the city on evacuation buses following weeks of brutal bombardment that have reduced much of it to rubble.

Ukrainian forces were fighting “difficult bloody battles” against Russian troops for a second day, Denys Prokopenko, commander of the Azov regiment, said in a brief video released on Telegram late on Wednesday.