Sarah Rainsford
Reporting from Kyiv

The bottom floors of this new block of flats have been destroyed in the attack in central Kyiv. The entire front wall has been blown off; the insides of apartments shattered and burned.

Forensic teams are working at the scene as rescuers clear heaps of rubble and metal from the pavement, and scour the ruins for bodies or survivors.

The target seems likely to have been a large military factory, Artem, across the street: its windows have been blown out and workers are sweeping up heaps of glass.

But the victims confirmed by Ukrainian officials – one dead and several injured - are civilians.

Radio Liberty has confirmed that its journalist, Vira Hyrych, was killed in her home. She was 55. Her body was discovered this morning, carried out to a morgue van in a black bag.

A little earlier, I saw a young couple emerge from the wreck, carrying a few belongings. Olya had a skateboard under one arm and a cardboard box filled with houseplants.

She and Misha, both in their twenties, only moved into the building two weeks ago. Their flat was on the 14th floor, on the side looking away from the strike.

"We'd just got into the flat when we heard the first blast immediately. We’d only just come out of the lift," Misha says, explaining that they'd managed to make it onto their balcony and escape the fire.

"If we'd been a minute longer, we'd have been burned. Thirty seconds longer, and we'd have been killed," he says. "I'm lucky."

There could have been many more casualties here, but the building was so new many of the flats were not occupied: there are tattered "for sale" signs hanging from shattered windows.

Image source, Vera Hyrych/Facebook

A journalist for Radio Liberty in Ukraine has been killed during Russian shelling of Kyiv, the station has said.

Vira Hyrych was at home when a missile hit her building, according to a statement from Radio Liberty.

She was described as "a bright and kind person, a true professional" by her employer.

"A wonderful person is gone," her colleague Oleksandr Demchenko said on Facebook.

Radio Liberty, also known as Radio Free Europe, is a US-funded organisation which broadcasts news in areas of the world where free press may be restricted or not yet established.

Earlier, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said one body had been recovered after yesterday's missile attack, though no further details of the person killed were given at the time.

Moscow has confirmed that it hit Ukrainian targets, but has not commented on the strike on the building.

Image source, EPA

Russia has confirmed that it launched multiple missile strikes on Ukraine yesterday, including in the Kyiv area.

The Russian defence ministry said it used "high precision" missiles to destroy the production facilities of a space-rocket plant in the capital.

It also said its air strikes hit ten Ukrainian "military assets", and destroyed three power substations across the country.

It was not possible to independently verify the claims.

There was no mention of rockets hitting a residential block in the capital, where one person has now been reported dead.

Image source, Getty Images

Two British volunteers providing humanitarian assistance in Ukraine have been captured by the Russian military, an aid organisation has said.

The non-profit Presidium Network said the men were detained at a checkpoint near the city of Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine on Monday.

They are believed to have been working independently, but were in touch with the Presidium Network.

Presidium Network's co-founder, Dominic Byrne, said the two workers were trying to evacuate a Ukrainian family caught in the fighting.

"They got through a Ukraine checkpoint to go south through Russian controlled area when we lost contact on Monday morning," he told BBC Breakfast.

He said the civilians waiting to be evacuated began receiving strange texts from the Briton's phone and two hours later, Russian soldiers stormed the civilians house, asking how they knew the British men and that they believed they were spies.

The Foreign Office has said it is urgently seeking more information.

Image source, EPA

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made a fresh request to address African Union heads of state, according to AU Commission Chairperson, Moussa Faki.

Faki received the request during a call with Ukraine's foreign minister, he said on Twitter., external

The pair also talked about President Zelensky's "wish to develop closer ties with the AU".

Faki didn't disclose whether the request will be granted but said he had "insisted on the need for a peaceful solution to the conflict with Russia".

African countries dominated the list of nations that abstained from voting on a UN resolution to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council.

Earlier this month, Zelensky held a call with his Senegalese counterpart Macky Sall, the current AU chairman, and asked to address African leaders.

One person has died following yesterday's Russian missile strike in Kyiv, the city's mayor has said.

In a post on his Telegram channel, Vitali Klitschko said rescuers had found a body while searching through the rubble of a residential building that was hit by a rocket in the Shevchenkivskyi district.

The strikes took place while United Nations Security General Antonio Guterres was in the capital to meet Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zelensky accused Russia of trying to humiliate the UN.

Russia has not commented on the incident.

Joel Gunter
Reporting from Kyiv

A Ukrainian man has described his harrowing experience of being captured and tortured by invading troops - and then taken to a prison in Russia for three weeks.

Nikita Horban was later returned to Ukraine in a prisoner swap. He has been learning to walk again having lost his toes to frostbite - a result of torture by Russian soldiers.

Speaking to the BBC, the 31-year-old lab assistant said his ordeal began when Russian troops entered his village west of Kyiv.

"There was shooting, people in the village were being killed," he says. "It was terrifying."

As part of the torture, soldiers forced him to lie in a freezing cold field, in water-filled boots, for days on end. Nikita and his stepfather were then transported to a prison in the Russian city of Kursk - where he faced medical neglect.

His toes later had to be amputated after one of them "just fell off", Nikita says.

Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, who has been negotiating prisoner swaps, says many Ukrainians are being returned with severe injuries.

Read Nikita's full story here

A checkpoint in a Russian village bordering Ukraine was shelled on Friday, the governor of the Kursk region has said, Reuters news agency reports.

Roman Starovoyt said mortars hit a checkpoint in Krupets, not far from the Ukrainian city of Sumy in the north-east.

"There were no casualties or damage."

Starovoyt said Russian border guards and military gave retaliatory fire.

Image source, EPA

As we've been reporting, several Russian air strikes hit the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Thursday as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres visited the city to meet Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In a late-night address, Zelensky condemned the attack, saying it "says a lot about Russia's true attitude to global institutions".

Ukraine's president accused Russia's leadership of trying to "humiliate the UN and everything that the organisation represents," adding it "requires a strong response."

Russian attacks in other cities across the country, including Fastiv and Odesa "once again prove that we cannot let our guard down", he said.

"We cannot think that the war is over. We still have to fight. We still have to drive the occupiers out," he added.

Zelensky stressed it was important that the UN chief visited sites of mass graves in Borodyanka, and the Kyiv region, to see "with his own eyes what the Russian occupiers had done there".

Image source, Reuters

Ukraine's foreign affairs minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has urged the country's allies to "decide which security guarantees they are ready to provide" Kyiv.

In a tweet, he said Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons , external"for the sake of world peace," but had been left vulnerable as a result.

"We have then been knocking on Nato’s door, but it never opened."

The Ministry of Defence's morning intelligence briefing reiterates that Russia's efforts are on the eastern states of Donetsk and Luhansk, known as the Donbas region.

"The Battle of Donbas remains Russia's main strategic focus," the ministry said, noting Moscow's state aim to secure control of the area, where Russian forces have supported rebel leaders since 2014.

It noted fighting had been particularly heavy around Lysychansk and Severodonetsk, and there had been an attempted advance south towards Slovyansk.

Ukraine is hoping to evacuate civilians from the vast Azovstal steel plant in the besieged port city of Mariupol today, the Ukrainian president's office has said.

"An operation is planned today to get civilians out of the plant," Reuters news agency quoted Volodymyr Zelensky's office as saying.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres discussed evacuating civilians from Mariupol when he met Zelensky on Thursday.

Guterres said intense discussions were under way to enable the evacuation of the Azovstal steel plant - the last part of the city not under Russian control - which has been pounded by Russian forces.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed "in principle" to the involvement of the UN and International Committee for the Red Cross in evacuating people from the plant.

It is believed hundreds of men, women and children are still sheltering beneath the site.

Image source, .

If you're just joining us from the UK, good morning. Here's what you need to know:

• Nato has warned the West that they must prepare for the long haul, with deputy secretary-general Mircea Geoană telling the BBC that the war may last for years
• The fallout continues for Moscow after Russia sent missiles to Kyiv while UN Secretary General Antoni Guterres was visiting the capital
• The missiles hit residential buildings in a central district, injuring at least three people. One landed near the UN chief’s hotel, according to his team, who were uninjured
• The rockets landed barely an hour after Guterres and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky held their joint press conference. Guterres criticised the UN Security Council for failing to prevent or end the war
• Zelensky also welcomed US President Joe Biden’s request to Congress to send $33bn (£27bn) more in aid to Ukraine

• Meanwhile, fighting rages on in Ukraine’s east and south. Russia is aiming to secure the Donbas region and the southern city of Mariupol. However, there has been a strong Ukrainian response, analysts say

And with that, this is Tessa Wong and Frances Mao in Singapore signing off. Our colleagues Alex Therrien, Jeremy Gahagan and Anna Boyd in London will continue bringing you the latest developments.

Image source, Reuters

Around 8,000 British Army troops will join a series of exercises across Europe this summer, in one of the largest deployments since the Cold War.

The training has been planned for some time, but the scale of the exercises has been ramped up since the invasion of Ukraine.

The Defence Secretary Ben Wallace described the move as "a show of solidarity and strength" that will "deter aggression at a scale not seen in Europe this century".

The soldiers will join forces with allies across Nato and the Joint Expeditionary Force alliance, which includes Finland and Sweden.

Image source, Reuters

China's state-owned oil and gas giant CNOOC says it has no concrete plans to pick up Russian energy investments being abandoned by Western firms following the invasion of Ukraine.

The Telegraph recently reported that Shell was in talks with CNOOC to sell a stake in a massive liquified natural gas field in Russia.

But CNOOC’s finance chief, Xie Weizhi, told Reuters: “Currently the Russia-Ukraine conflict is at a complex stage. We're monitoring the situation and do not have any concrete plan or action yet."

He added that it was not clear how Western businesses would offload their investments in the first place, since they would need to get approval from Russia to do so.

"We don't understand how they (the global majors) would exit Russia and that by itself would need approval from the host country," he said.

Image source, SOPA images

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which has maintained an observational and monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine for years, announced yesterday that it would have to end the long-running deployment.

Moscow - one of the group's members - vetoed an extension of the mission.

“This is not an easy decision to take... but the position of the Russian Federation left us with no choice but to take steps to close down the Mission,” said the OSCE chairman and Poland's foreign minister Zbigniew Rau.

“The Mission played a crucial role in providing objective information on the ground, facilitating ceasefires and working to ease the effects of the conflict on the civilian population."

The OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine had been deployed since 2014 when conflict first broke out between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed rebels. The OSCE was the only international organisation which directly followed the conflict.

Earlier this year Chinese programmer Jixian Wang moved to the Ukrainian port city of Odesa for work.

Months later, Russia invaded the country. Mr Wang found that back home his friends and family were being told a different version of what was happening in Ukraine, by Chinese state media.

He decided to start making videos highlighting the reality of his situation and posted them on Chinese social media in the hopes of reaching his fellow countrymen.

Since then he has been heavily censored and briefly cut off from contact with his family back home. But Mr Wang tells the BBC he is determined to continue.

We're resuming our live coverage of the war in Ukraine, where it is now 07:15.

In the last few hours, Nato has warned that the West needs to be prepared for the long haul.

Speaking to the BBC, deputy secretary-general Mircea Geoană said: "It's clear that the next few days and weeks could prove decisive, but the war would probably take longer.

"Could be weeks, could be months, could be even years - it depends on a lot of factors. But, in the end, probably this will be fought and won, hopefully, by Ukraine on the battlefield."

Russia yesterday sent targeted missiles to Kyiv during UN chief Antonio Guterres' visit to the capital.

Image source, Getty Images

We'll be back on Friday morning Kyiv time. We leave you with a round-up of Thursday's key developments:

• Two blasts hit the capital Kyiv while UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was in the city for talks with Ukraine's President Zelensky
• Missiles hit the central Shevchenkivskyi district and authorities said at least three people were injured
• Zelensky said in his evening address that five rockets had struck the capital city
• Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called it a "heinous act of barbarism"

• Guterres' team said one of the rockets landed near the hotel where he was staying in Kyiv, but that he and his delegation were unscathed
• The missiles fell barely an hour after Guterres and Zelensky held a joint press conference, where Guterres criticised the UN's security council for failing to prevent or end the war

• US President Joe Biden asked Congress for $33bn (£27bn) in military, economic and humanitarian aid to support Ukraine
• Zelensky thanked Biden in an evening address, and said it would significantly improve Ukraine's fighting ability

• A British national - believed to have been fighting for Ukrainian forces - has been killed, while another is still missing.
• Nato says it's ready to support Ukraine for years to come as it warns the war could "drag on".

Earlier we reported that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres visited Kyiv, and met President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Later at a press conference, Zelensky said the war with Russia is preventing it from supplying the world with enough food.

Zelensky said they had discussed deblocking Ukraine's ports to allow the export of food and avert a global food crisis.