Image source, Getty Images

The US Department of Treasury has officially blacklisted two Russian businesses - a diamond-miner and a shipbuilder - barring their access to the US financial system.

The latest sanctions target the Russian state-owned enterprises, United Shipbuilding Corp and the Alrosa diamond mining company.

"Through these designations, Treasury is cutting off additional sources of support and revenue for the Government of the Russian Federation to wage its unprovoked war against Ukraine," the US officials said in a press release, external.

Alrosa is the largest diamond mining company in the world, accounting for 28% of global diamond mining, the US statement said, adding that in 2021 Alrosa generated over $4.2bn in revenue.

United Shipbuilding Corp is "responsible for the construction of almost all of Russia’s warships", the US statement added.

Alice Evans
BBC News

Nick Reynolds, a land warfare analyst with the Royal United Services Institute, a British defence think tank, says he believes Russian military morale will have been sapped by their failure to take Kyiv.

“The Russian retreat was very rapid from Kyiv and around Kyiv, which actually did have an impact on the Russian forces as well – they left behind quite a few personnel, abandoned a lot of their dead and a lot of their equipment, which they could have recovered,” he says.

The Russians, says Reynolds, have taken an “absolute mauling”.

He believes Russian leaders will have “serious problems” motivating their troops to mount a new offensive. It will be “very difficult” and some forces “may just refuse”.

The relief of Kyiv will make it much easier for Ukraine to redeploy its troops, says Reynolds. They are returning from battles around the country "victorious", which will bolster their fighting spirit, he says.

Image source, Getty Images

Four civilians were killed while trying to escape by boat from the occupied Kherson region, according to regional Ukrainian authorities.

The ship was sailing from the village of Pervomaivka when it was attacked about 70m (230ft) from shore.

According to the official, a member of the Kryvyi Rih city government, there were 14 people aboard the boat.

Two men and one woman were killed instantly, while a 13-year-old child died later. Seven people have been admitted to hospital and two were missing, the official said. It's not clear if the 14th person on the boat was injured, missing or unscathed.

The BBC has not verified this information.

Kherson, a southern port city near Crimea, was seized by Russia on the eighth day of the invasion.

Image source, Getty Images

Legendary British rock band Pink Floyd has released a song in support of Ukraine.

The track is called "Hey Hey Rise Up". It features the vocals of Andriy Khlyvnyuk, from Ukrainian band Boombox.

Pink Floyd band member David Gilmour said he was inspired by a video on Instagram by Khlyvnyuk, who is currently serving in Kyiv's defence, in which he sings in an empty Sofia Square in the Ukrainian capital.

Gilmour wrote the music for the song, and then spoke by phone to Khlyvnyuk in hospital, where he is recovering from injuries.

"I played a little on the phone and he gave me his blessing. We both hope to do something together in person in the future," said the British musician.

This is Pink Floyd's first song since 1994, and all proceeds from the sale will go to humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

Friday's Financial Times leads with reports that aluminium producer Rusal has become the first Russian group to call for an inquiry into alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

Ukraine says more than 300 civilians were killed by the Russians in Bucha, although Moscow denies any involvement.

Unlike a number of other Russian companies, Rusal is not the target of sanctions, although its billionaire founder Oleg Deripaska is.

The war in Ukraine and the backlash against it have also wreaked havoc on Rusal's supply chains.

In a statement on Wednesday, external, it wrote that it was shocked by reports from the city of Bucha in recent days.

"We support an objective and impartial investigation of this crime and call for severe punishment for the perpetrators. No matter how hard it may seem in the context of ongoing information war," it said.

The company also called for "an early peaceful resolution of this conflict, to preserve priceless human lives and return to normalcy."

Image source, Getty Images

President Joe Biden has issued a statement to "applaud" the UN vote removing Russia from the United Nations Human Right Council (UNHCR).

"This is a meaningful step by the international community further demonstrating how Putin’s war has made Russia an international pariah," said Biden.

He said the US led the charge to remove Russia after discovering that it was "committing gross and systemic violations of human rights".

He added: "The images we are seeing out of Bucha and other areas of Ukraine as Russian troops withdraw are horrifying.

"The signs of people being raped, tortured, executed - in some cases having their bodies desecrated - are an outrage to our common humanity.

"Russia’s lies are no match for the undeniable evidence of what is happening in Ukraine."

Image source, Ukrainian government

In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky praised Ukrainians for their courage, which he said should be spread around the world.

"If everyone in the world had at least 10% of the courage we Ukrainians have, there would be no danger to international law at all. There would be no danger to the freedom of nations. We will spread our courage," he said.

He added that "being brave is our brand", while also calling for the world to impose bolder sanctions on Russia.

He also said that "the strongest sanction against Russia of all that can be" is more weapons shipments to use against Russia.

He also commented on news that Russia had been suspended from the UN Human Rights Council.

"Russia has long had nothing to do with the concept of human rights. Maybe one day this will change," he said.

"But so far the Russian state and the Russian military are the biggest threat on the planet to freedom, to human security, to the concept of human rights as such. Obviously."

Following Zelensky's comments on the situation in Mariupol, let's take a look at this interview the BBC did with Ukrainians who decided to flee the war-torn southern port city.

They faced an agonising choice: risk travelling through the Russian checkpoints of the front line to seek safety, or stay put to endure starvation and siege.

One refugee described the Sea of Azov city as "a graveyard".

Warning: the below video contains distressing scenes.

Image source, Reuters

More from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's latest video address.

Speaking about the besieged Ukrainian southern port of Mariupol, he said: "And what will happen when the world learns the whole truth about what the Russian military did in Mariupol?

"There, on almost every street, is what the world saw in Bucha and other towns in the Kyiv region after the withdrawal of Russian troops. The same cruelty. The same terrible crimes."

Mariupol - a city of about 500,000 before the war - has been virtually wiped out by weeks of heavy Russian shelling, Ukraine says. More than 100,000 residents are believed still to be trapped there.

Zelensky warned that Russia may be preparing a "mirror response" in Mariupol, following the world outcry over the mass killings in Bucha.

"They [Russians] are going to show the victims in Mariupol as if they were not killed by the Russian military - but by Ukrainian defenders of the city. To do this, the occupiers are collecting corpses on the streets and taking them out."

He said the bodies might be used in other places for propaganda purposes.

Image source, Getty Images

The destruction to the town of Borodyanka is "much more horrific" than what has already been uncovered in nearby Bucha, Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky said in his newest Facebook address to the nation late on Thursday.

"They have started sorting through the ruins in Borodyanka," Zelensky said in his remarks from Kyiv.

"It's much more horrific there. There are even more victims of Russian occupiers."

Both towns are suburbs of Kyiv and saw fierce fighting in the battle for the capital.

Image source, Getty Images

Twenty-six bodies have been recovered from underneath the rubble of two destroyed apartment buildings in Borodyanka, north-west of Kyiv, according to Ukraine's prosecutor general.

Iryna Venediktova accused Moscow of deliberately targeting civilian areas, in a post on Facebook.

"There is no military site here," she said, adding that Russian forces "shelled residential infrastructure in the evenings, when there was a maximum amount of people home".

Venediktova claimed there was "evidence of the Russian forces' war crimes at every turn".

Image source, Getty Images

The European Union has approved an embargo on Russian coal imports.

The measure will take effect from mid-August, a month later than originally planned, following pressure from Germany to delay, reports Reuters news agency.

The French presidency of the European Council said the sanction was estimated to be worth 4bn euros ($4.4bn) per year.

The measure came as the US Congress on Thursday passed a bill to ban imports of oil and gas from Russia, sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature.

The EU has meanwhile started working on more sanctions.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that, if not natural gas, oil would follow soon.

The new coal sanction had to be agreed by all 27 member states and there had been concerns from some members about the impact.

Particularly for those that are heavily reliant on Russian energy – like Germany.

Members had called for clarification about whether the sanction would affect existing coal contracts or just future ones.

Ukranian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told Nato on Thursday: "As long as the West continues buying Russian gas and oil it is supporting Ukraine with one hand while supporting [the] Russian war machine with another hand."

• What sanctions are being imposed on Russia?

Josep Borrell, the EU's chief diplomat, acknowledged that the one billion euros (£833m) Europe has sent to Ukraine in military assistance was overshadowed by the one billion euros spent on Russian energy every day.

George Wright
BBC News

Image source, Getty Images

The discovery of the killing of civilians in Bucha near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv following the withdrawal of Russian forces has sparked widespread accusations of war crimes.

Ukraine's president and Poland's prime minister have gone further and said the actions amount to genocide - and the UK prime minister says the attacks do not "look far short" of it.

But the US and the Western military alliance, Nato, have stopped short of using that word to describe what's happening in Ukraine.

So is there a case for accusing Russian forces of committing what has been called the "crime of all crimes"?

Read more here.

Support for the Ukrainian people and what they are going through is not just limited to diplomacy and fundraising.

It seems it can also be expressed via the medium of music - the Ukrainian group Kalush Orchestra are the bookies' favourites to win the Eurovision Song Contest when it is held in Turin, Italy, next month.

On Thursday they will be holding their first international performance since the invasion of Ukraine.

The six members of the band were given special permission to go to Israel, for a pre-Eurovision concert - men of military age are banned from leaving Ukraine.

Russia was barred from taking part in the annual competition following its invasion of Ukraine.

Yogita Limaye
BBC News, Yahidne

On the white, damp wall of the Yahidne school basement is a crude calendar, drawn in red crayon. It marks a period of unimaginable trauma - from 5 March to 2 April - for the people of this village.

Yahidne, 140km (80 miles) north-west of Kyiv, which is close to the borders with Belarus and Russia, was occupied by Russian soldiers for nearly a month.

They took men, women and children from their homes at gunpoint and held them in the basement of the local school for four weeks - around 130 people cramped into a room roughly 65 sq m (700 sq ft) in size.

Sixty-year-old Mykola Klymchuk was one of them. He offered to show us the basement.

"This was my half a metre of space. I was sleeping standing up," he said. His voice choked up and he started crying. "I tied myself to the railing here with my scarf so I wouldn't fall over. I spent 25 nights like this."

Mykola said you couldn't move for fear of stepping on people. About 40 or 50 children were among those held captive. The youngest was just two months old.

"During my time here, 12 people died," Mykola said. Most were elderly people. It's unclear what they died of, but Mykola believes some suffocated to death.

When people died, the bodies couldn't immediately be removed.

This meant that people, including children, lived amidst corpses for hours, and sometimes days, until they could be taken outside.

Read the report in full: Ukraine war: Sharing space with the dead - horror outside Chernihiv

Land warfare analyst Nick Reynolds, who works for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, has been filling us in on what the next few weeks of the war in Ukraine might look like, as Russia shifts its focus to the area in the south and east known as the Donbas.

Was Ukraine's foreign minister accurate when he said the fighting in the Donbas could be reminiscent of World War Two?

“Yes I think that’s accurate," Reynolds said. "With all the forces freed up from the north of Ukraine… we’re going to see a clash of arms on European soil that hasn’t been seen for generations."

Could Ukraine actually take back territory?

There are a lot of unknown factors here, Reynolds says.

Many Ukrainians will be buoyed up by the withdrawal of Russian forces in the north, but in the south and east “the map has still been slowly turning red”, he says, and that's even before any reinforcements have arrived from the north.

So Russia certainly still has some forward momentum in the south and east, he says.

How much difference could Western arms make?

The weapons Western countries have so far sent to Ukraine have been game-changing, but Nato has handed over a "significant amount of its stocks - and that supply was finite", Reynolds says.

Western arms will be "absolutely essential" in the coming weeks but it's hard to know how they can get them to where they need to go, he adds.

Ramping up industrial production of sophisticated weapons such as Javelins, NLAWs and Stingers is not easy, he says, as they have complex supply chains. He believes Western governments are struggling to keep up with demand.

Switchblade drones could “start to change things on the ground within a short timeframe” – but there’s “very little else” that could do so, he adds.

Image source, Getty Images

Russia has suffered "significant losses of troops", President Vladimir Putin's spokesman has said.

Dmitry Peskov was asked on Sky News whether the war had been a "humiliation", given that Russia had retreated from the capital, lost thousands of troops and that President Volodymyr Zelensky was still in power.

He said this was a "wrong understanding" of what was going on.

But asked again if Russia has lost thousands of troops, he said: "Yes, we have significant losses of troops and it's a huge tragedy for us."

He then added that the withdrawal from the Kyiv region and the northern city of Chernihiv was an "act of goodwill" to "lift tension" during peace talks.

In the interview, Peskov repeated Russia's reasons for what it describes as a "special military operation", saying Ukraine had become "anti-Russian" and Russia was "really nervous" as Nato had "started to move towards our boundaries".

Russia has previously said that 1,351 soldiers have been killed. The full death toll is not known, but a Nato official has been quoted in US media as saying it is between 7,000 and 15,000, and there are similar US estimates.