Image source, Getty Images

Ukraine's state run nuclear company says electricity supplies to the former power plant at Chernobyl have been cut and has warned that radioactive substances could be released, because spent nuclear fuel cannot be cooled.

In a post of the telegram messaging app, Energoatom says a high-voltage line feeding the plant was disconnected after it was damaged during Russia's seizure of the station nearly two weeks ago.

Ukraine's Energy Minister German Galushchenko told the BBC that Ukraine has no access to monitoring information at the station and therefore cannot evaluate whether any radioactive substances are being released.

"We need to repair it as quickly as we can," Galushchenko said. But he added that there is "a special system of security in case of electricity cuts" which will allow the plant to operate for several days using diesel generators.

Earlier, the IAEA said it had stopped receiving monitoring data from the plant and warned that Ukrainian authorities had told them the plant's staff of about 210 workers have been on duty constantly for the past two weeks.

Image source, Sainikesh

We've heard about the thousands of Indian students who have been stuck in Ukraine and desperate to get out - but one student has been going in the opposite direction.

Sainikesh, 21, went to study aerospace engineering in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 2018 from the Indian southern state of Tamil Nadu. When the war broke out, his family asked him to return home but he refused, and instead signed up for the Ukrainian paramilitary forces.

Sainikesh's distraught parents - who heard the news from Indian intelligence officials - didn’t want to speak to reporters. Another relative told BBC Tamil that Sainikesh had always wanted to become a soldier but couldn’t make the cut because he was shorter than the Indian army’s requirement.

Indian defence officials have not yet been able to contact him. “All we want now is for Sainikesh to return home safely,” his relative said.

Image source, Getty Images

For the first time since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, the two countries' foreign ministers have agreed to meet for talks, which take place in Turkey tomorrow.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he hopes the meeting in the southern resort of Antalya will "open the door to a permanent ceasefire".

It's not clear what chance he has of progress as Russia's president has said he'll pursue his aims either through negotiations or military action.

Turkey's a member of Nato but its president has tried to carve out a different position from Western countries on the Russian invasion. While he said Turkey didn't accept what was happening to Ukrainians, sanctions had "almost turned into a witch hunt against the Russian people, literature, students and artists".

He singled out the Munich Philharmonic for sacking renowned conductor and Putin supporter Valery Gergiev, calling it "ridiculous".

Image source, TIKTOK/READY2ROCKLANDSCAPING

Two Scots helping to evacuate Ukrainian refugees have revealed how Russian soldiers held them at gunpoint.

Friends Joe McCarthy, 55, and Gary Taylor, 45, have been moving people across the border into Poland after driving to Ukraine at the start of the conflict.

The landscape gardeners got caught in a convoy of Russian troops as they headed for the north-eastern city of Sumy.

They told BBC Radio Scotland's Drivetime programme they had had supplies taken from them and the tyres on their truck shot out.

Image source, TIKTOK/READY2ROCKLANDSCAPING

The pair were eventually allowed to move on before local people came to their aid with tyres for their vehicle.

Joe said: "We still managed to get to Sumy. We managed to collect a young student called Rachael from Ireland as well as six other people before the bombing started last night.

"So they were well away and well safe."

You can read more here.

Jennifer Scott
Political reporter, BBC News

Image source, Getty Images

Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK is urging the UK government to drop visa rules for a limited time to allow refugees to get out of his country faster.

Appearing before a committee of MPs, Vadym Prystaiko, says over seven million people have now been displaced as a result of the war with Russia.

He insists few Ukrainians will want to move away from their “natural home” near “Slavic tribes” in Eastern Europe, and the government hopes to welcome them home soon to rebuild.

And he tells MPs he knows immigration is a very sensitive issue in the UK, and any changes are “frankly for you to decide”.

But Prystaiko asks MPs if they can vote for "some temporary releasing of us from the rules to allow people to get here”.

He adds: “I would be happy if all the barriers are dropped for some period of time when we can get maximum people, then we will deal with that and my embassy is here to help.”

Phil Mackie
Midlands correspondent, BBC News

Tetiana Osadchuk, 26, fled western Ukraine last week with her mother, Lesia, and younger brother, Viktor.

They crossed into Romania where they stayed for three days. There they were told they wouldn’t need a visa for the UK because her father lives in Reading.

After another long journey they arrived in Calais, and are staying at the town’s youth hostel. They visited the port to be told they needed to fill in the relevant forms and travel to Paris to have their fingerprints taken and provide documents. They spent the day travelling to and from the capital yesterday.

They’re back in Calais waiting to hear if they’ve been granted a visa, and were told to expect the process to take around five days.

Tetiana, who speaks good English and is acting as a translator for many of the Ukrainians in the hostel, says she wished the process could have been made simpler and less confusing.

Asked whether any British officials had visited the hostel to speak to the Ukrainians and explain what they needed to do, she said she hadn’t seen anyone.

Sarah Rainsford
BBC Eastern Europe Correspondent

Poltava is a safe city for now, but three trains were laid on to carry those who wanted to go further west. Almost 600 Indian students took up that offer last night and Ukrainian women and children followed on later trains.

Anna, a Ukrainian, who’d had to leave her parents at home in Sumy and escape with her two-year-old son and Tunisian husband, broke down in tears as we talked. Her mother is a pharmacist, her dad has to stay in Sumy and fight. She has no idea when she’ll see them again.

Local officials here told us some 7,000 people made it to safety in Poltava last night, in a mixture of private cars and evacuation buses. More plan to make the trip today as another ceasefire has been agreed.

Image source, Getty Images

Ukraine's deputy prime minister says Russia has agreed a 12 hour ceasefire in six of the areas worst affected by fighting to allow civilians to escape. We've yet to see if anyone has managed to leave as planned.

Iryna Vereshchuk says Moscow has agreed to respect the truce from 09:00 to 21:00 local time (07:00 until 19:00 GMT) around six areas that have been heavily hit by fighting.

Vereshchuk said evacuation corridors will be opened from:

• Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia
• Enerhodar to Zaporizhzhia
• Sumy to Poltava
• Izyum to Lozova
• Volnovakha to Pokrovsk in Donetsk
• And from several towns around Kyiv - Vorzel, Borodyanka, Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel - to the capital

Mikhail Mizintsev, head of Russia's National Defence Control Centre, says Moscow's forces will "observe a regime of silence" during the ceasefire.

Two previous attempts at a truce have failed, though as we've been reporting, some 7,000 people were evacuated from Sumy on Tuesday.

People have started leaving the north-eastern city of Sumy in private cars, according to televised comments from the city's mayor cited by the Reuters news agency.

Oleksandr Lysenko says a humanitarian corridor has been established for a second day to allow civilians to flee to safety and appears to be working.

The BBC has been told some 7,000 people were evacuated from the city yesterday.

Thousands of people have fled Ukrainian cities under similar arrangements in recent days, but in some cases Russia has been accused of shelling the exit routes.

Sarah Rainsford
BBC Eastern Europe Correspondent

The evacuees arrived in Poltava from Sumy last night, exhausted and tense after what must have seemed the longest journey of their lives. They tumbled off buses outside the railway station and rushed for a waiting train, anxious to be on their way as far as possible from the danger zone.

Many on the first convoy out of Sumy were medical students from India who’d been in town when Russia invaded. As friends scrambled to find seats on a train west, one woman described two "miserable" weeks living mostly underground with dwindling supplies of water and food. "We were starving," Manisa told me.

Another Indian student said the situation had been getting worse and more frightening with every day. On Monday night a Russian airstrike on a residential area killed at least 20 people including children. The shelling and bombing have been relentless and ruthless.

The evacuation buses were crammed full of people and some said they had to stand all the way to Poltava, 175km (108miles) south of Sumy. The convoy took almost 12 hours to get here, forced to drive a long way round areas of active fighting.

One student told me that as they’d left Sumy they'd seen Russian artillery and tanks. We have seen and verified one video that confirms there was shooting as one of the evacuation convoys gathered, but local officials say all buses laid on to get civilians out of Sumy yesterday were eventually able to leave the city successfully.

It was a long and gruelling trip; one convoy only arrived at 04:00. But it was the first successful mass evacuation in this conflict so far. Efforts to get people out of the besieged port city of Mariupol to the south have failed, repeatedly.

Image source, Getty Images

A Ukrainian MP has told the BBC that authorities in the besieged south-eastern city of Mariupol believe they have just three days of food supplies left available to them before hunger starts to set in.

Dmytro Gurin, whose parents live in Mariupol, said the mayor's office had told him that the streets of the port city are lined with bodies and that authorities have been forced to dig a "mass grave for 33 people because the cemeteries are inaccessible because of shelling".

"Now we have the situation where civilians and peaceful cities are carpet bombed," Gurin said. "My parents live in the eastern district of Mariupol, there isn't any military infrastructure in this area and never were".

Gurin called on Western nations to recognise that "World War Three is already started", and urged the US to allow Poland to equip the Ukrainian Air Force with old MiG-29 fighter jets.

"The only question of when to join these forces is how many Ukrainians die and how many Ukrainians will die in a week," he argued.

"Great Britain remembers making this choice 80 years ago and we think its an important choice, not only for us, but for you and for your future".

Image source, Getty Images

We've reported on countless stories of Ukrainian refugees' journeys as they flee their homes in search of shelter in neighbouring countries.

Now the head of the United Nation's refugee agency, UNHCR, has said the focus needs to be on helping refugees at the borders, Reuters news agency reports.

Speaking at a press conference in Stockholm, the UNHCR high commissioner Filippo Grandi said "the time is now to try to help at the border", rather than having discussions about how refugees should be divided between countries.

He pointed out that Moldova, which is not a member of the EU and shares a border with Ukraine, is particularly vulnerable due to the influx of refugees.

On Saturday, Moldova's foreign minister said the country was "near breaking point".

Grandi added that the number of refugees who have left since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began has probably reached between 2.1 and 2.2 million.

Image source, Getty Images

Ukraine will try to evacuate civilians through six "humanitarian corridors" on Wednesday, including from the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk has said.

In a video statement she said Ukrainian armed forces had agreed to stop firing in those areas for 12 hours from 09:00 to 21:00 local time (07:00 until 19:00 GMT) - and urged Russian forces to fulfil their commitment to local ceasefires.

The news comes as Ukraine managed to carry out its first mass evacuation exercise on Tuesday, bussing an estimated 5,000 civilians from the city of Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine to Poltava, in the centre.

Authorities in Kyiv have previously accused Moscow of shelling a refugee corridor intended for civilians trying to escape the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

It is also unclear whether the six proposed routes will go - previous offers of routes to Russia or its ally Belarus were rejected by the Ukrainian government.

Image source, Getty Images

UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps denied that the UK is lagging behind other European countries when it comes to taking in Ukrainian refugees.

Shapps told the BBC's Today programme that some 760 refugees have arrived in the UK so far, lagging behind neighbouring countries, including Ireland, which has accepted over 2,000 people since the crisis began.

While he argued that the UK has " massively ramped up" the pace at which it deals with visa applications from Ukrainian refugees, he noted that "we do need to know who is coming to the country".

Shapps added that over 200,000 people are eligible to come to the UK through a family scheme that allows Ukrainians to join relatives in Britain and said "we have expanded that definition up and up, so it can be aunts and uncles and that sort of thing".

However he added that President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked that his citizens stay relatively close to home and expressed a desire that they are not "overly distributed around the world".

More than two million people have now fled Ukraine according to the United Nations.

Image source, EPA

The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, has called on Russian forces who are effectively in control of the Chernobyl nuclear site in northern Ukraine to allow some of the staff there to have a break.

In a statement, Rafael Grossi said the Ukrainian authorities had told him the same group of about 210 workers had been on duty constantly for the past two weeks.

Grossi said he was deeply concerned about the stressful situation facing the personnel.

The employees, he said, must be able to rest and work in regular shifts, stressing that this was crucial for overall nuclear safety.

Russian soldiers entered the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986 on 24 February, just hours after Moscow began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Grossi also indicated that remote transmission of data from security monitoring systems at the power plant to the IAEA had been lost.

Nick Thorpe
BBC News, in Budapest

News of the first successful mass evacuations of civilians from besieged cities is being followed closely by Ukrainians who have already left the country, as well as by those who are internally displaced, but still in Ukraine.

The two million Ukrainians who have left the country already constitute half the 4 million the UN refugee agency initially estimated might try to leave.

The sheer speed with which this is happening is testing the resources and organisational capacity of the five countries on Ukraine’s western border.

For now at least, thanks to the work of local authorities, aid organisations, and the generosity of the population, the relief effort in central Europe is impressive.

Adam Easton
Warsaw Correspondent

Image source, EPA

About 1.33 million people have fled Ukraine to Poland since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Polish Border Guard agency says.

In a tweet on Wednesday, the agency says of the people who have entered Poland, 93% are Ukrainian citizens, 1% are Polish and 6% are citizens of almost 100 other nations.

The agency says that on Tuesday alone, 125,800 people crossed the frontier, down from Sunday’s daily record of 142,300.

By 06:00 GMT on Wednesday, 33,500 people had crossed the frontier.

Poland is already home to many Ukrainians - estimates range between one and two million people - and a lot have have gone to stay with family or friends there.

Thousands of Poles are hosting refugees in their own homes too.

The UK government's latest dispatch on the war , externalstates that Ukraine's air defences have "enjoyed considerable success" against Russian aircraft.

That has likely prevented Moscow from achieving "any degree of control of the air", the Defence Ministry said.

Its brief also noted that Russian forces continue to struggle in their Kyiv campaign and have failed to make any breakthroughs in taking the capital.

Image source, UKRAINE PRESIDENT

Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska has released her first public statement in a letter addressed to the global community.

In it, she relays the horrors of war, particularly for women and children. She also named some child casualties of the war so far:

• “Eight-year-old Alice who died on the streets of Okhtyrka while her grandfather tried to protect her.
• “Polina from Kyiv, who died in the shelling with her parents.
• “14-year-old Arseniy was hit in the head by wreckage, and could not be saved because an ambulance could not get to him on time because of intense fires.

“When Russia says that it is 'not waging war against civilians,' I call out the names of these murdered children first,” she's written.

She thanked the support of the international community, and neighbouring nations who have taken in refugees. But she also repeated the calls of her husband, President Zelensky, for Western nations to declare a no-fly zone. Nato has resisted this action because it would involve Western forces likely engaging militarily with Russian aircraft.

“We need those in power to close the sky. Close the sky and we will manage the war on the ground ourselves."

“With this letter, I testify and tell the world: the war in Ukraine is not a war 'somewhere out there'. This is a war in Europe, close to the EU borders."

“If we don't stop Putin, who threatens to start a nuclear war, there will be no safe place in the world for any of us.”

James Waterhouse
Kyiv correspondent, BBC News

The latest ceasefires are part of a series of announcements by the Russian defence ministry of pauses in fighting in key cities, including Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.

Mariupol has had failed attempted ceasefires over the past few days where people have packed up, tried to leave and Moscow has been accused of shelling the very route that people have been trying to get out of.

Nevertheless, these ceasefires have been announced, including in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, we don't yet know the final destinations where people will be able to escape the fighting.

The evacuation of 5,000 people from Sumy is seen as a positive breakthrough, but it's a really difficult decision for people to make - all the while that more cities are falling under siege, being surrounded by Russian forces.

That's the concern from Ukrainian military chiefs. However, they are defiant this morning, claiming the Russian advance has been slowed because of the resistance it is being met with in Ukraine's key cities.

Which is why Russian forces are resorting to bombing and shelling residential areas and surrounding cities to try and force Ukraine into submission.

Of course, it is Ukrainians that pay the highest price in this war.