There has been no let-up in the fighting in Ukraine despite much attention on events in Moscow:

• Russia's defence ministry said 200 targets in Ukraine had been attacked, in an update on its Telegram channel this morning
• Much of the action has focused on the east of the country and the Donbas, with Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Haidai describing "very serious battles" around Bilogorivka and Rubizhne
• A US-made radar system was reportedly destroyed near Zolote in Luhansk
• In Severodonetsk, the easternmost city still held by Ukraine, a Ukrainian soldier told AFP news agency Russians had entered its northern side. "We are defending the southern half of the city," the soldier said
• The southern region of Odesa was hit by four missiles fired from nearby Crimea
• Ukrainian forces were able to stall Russian advances, especially around the strategically important town of Izyum which the Russians want to use as a launchpad for a larger assault

Image source, EPA

The European Council President, Charles Michel, has had to take shelter during a visit to Odesa because of a missile strike, according to an EU official.

During a meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, "participants needed to interrupt the meeting to take shelter as missiles struck again the region".

Michel was visiting the city in the south-west to witness the impact of Russia's war on global supply chains.

He was briefed by the head of Ukraine's navy in particular on the damage caused by Russian missiles fired from the sea and was able to witness at first hand the destruction of a residential building and its impact on civilians.

The discussions with the prime minister, joined by President Volodymyr Zelensky via video link from Kyiv, focused on how best the EU could continue to support Ukraine in meeting humanitarian, economic and military challenges.

Andrew Harding
Reporting from Donbas

The family of a Ukrainian volunteer soldier, killed by Russian shrapnel and buried last week at his village in the eastern Donbas region, have spent Victory Day at home, quietly avoiding any discussion about Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his invasion.

“I don’t want to think about politics,” said Ivan Naduty’s widow, Ella.

“I didn’t want him to go to war because I knew this might happen. I thought it more important for our son to have his father by his side. But he was a stubborn man. So he volunteered the day after the invasion. He said he had to go, to defend us, and to defend his country. He was a good man."

Last Friday Ukrainian soldiers joined the entire village at the cemetery, firing a salute, and dropping earth on his coffin.

“Glory to our heroes. My father told me what it was like to fight the Nazis. Now the same thing is happening. Innocent people are dying. What more can I say? Thank you, Britain, for helping us.” said Ivan Tagamlyk, a village elder.

Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine have not stopped and are being held remotely, according to Russia's chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky.

"Negotiations in the remote format have not been stopped," Medinsky told Interfax news agency.

Asked whether officials from Moscow and Kyiv would also hold face-to-face talks, Medinsky said: "To do this, you need to have more specifics on hand - in order to meet in a face-to-face format."

Ukrainian and Russian officials have not held in person peace talks since 29 March. The two sides have since held talks by video link.

Moscow has accused Kyiv of stalling the talks and using reports of atrocities committed by Russian troops in Ukraine to undermine negotiations.

On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the BBC the "minimum" concession from Russia in return for a peace deal would be "a return of Russian forces to where they were on 23 February".

Adam Easton
Warsaw Correspondent

Image source, EPA

People protesting against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Poland have thrown what appears to be red paint over the Russian ambassador to the country during a ceremony at a cemetery for Soviet soldiers in Warsaw.

Ambassador Sergei Andreyev and other Russian embassy officials went to lay wreaths at the cemetery, which contains the remains of more than 20,000 Soviet Army soldiers killed fighting the Germans in occupied Poland, on the day Russia celebrates victory over Nazi Germany in the World War Two.

A group of protesters waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags threw a red substance, reportedly paint, into the face of the ambassador. The Russian embassy delegation abandoned the ceremony following the incident.

Protesters told Polish news broadcaster TVN24 the red substance symbolised the blood of Ukrainian victims of the Russians.

Image source, EPA

Sophie Williams
Reporting from Lviv

Here in Ukraine, people have been left outraged after seeing Russian President Vladimir Putin place flowers on a memorial to veterans including those from the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Odesa.

It took place as part of today's Victory Day parade in Moscow.

Larysa Denysenko, a Ukrainian lawyer described the incident as "rotten" on Facebook.

"There was an air alarm in Kyiv at this time," she wrote.

Image source, EPA

Ukrainian tennis player Alex Dolgopolov said: "He bombs Kyiv and Odesa and then goes to put flowers on those cities."

Another person from Kyiv wrote on Twitter: "The level of hypocrisy is unbearable."

Ukraine is on alert today for missile attacks and people have been warned to remain vigilant.

Frank Gardner
BBC News, Security Correspondent

Image source, EPA

Two things stand out from today’s Victory Day parade in Moscow and the accompanying speech by President Putin.

Firstly, there will be a collective sigh of relief in much of the world that Putin did not, as was feared, use this to escalate the war in Ukraine in some form.

His speech, while wrapping that conflict in the patriotic mantle of the Great Patriotic War (World War Two), did not dwell on Russian victories in Ukraine because there have hardly been any.

Secondly, there is a glaring disconnect between the impressive and well-choreographed parade in Red Square and the reality on the battlefield in Ukraine, where Russia’s shambolic campaign is struggling to defeat a much smaller enemy.

The serried ranks of marching troops gave Russian viewers the impression of a powerful, perhaps even invincible army.

Yet the truth is that without a general mobilisation Russia simply does not have enough troops to conquer, subdue and occupy Ukraine.

While a lot of today's focus has been on Victory Day events in Moscow, fighting on the ground is Ukraine is continuing.

An attack near the town of Zolote in the Luhansk region in the east of the country destroyed a US-made counter-battery radar station, Russia's defence ministry has said.

The BBC is unable to verify this information independently.

On Friday, US President Joe Biden pledged a further $150m (£121.6m) worth of military aid for Ukrainian forces, including additional radar units, along with artillery and munitions.

Putin's speech offers scant clues on next stepspublished at 12:23 British Summer Time 9 May 2022

12:23 BST 9 May 2022

Steve Rosenberg
BBC Russia editor

In his Red Square address to Russian troops - and the Russian nation - the Kremlin leader repeated his frequently voiced justification for attacking Ukraine: an argument that appears to blame everyone but Russia for what’s happening.

He criticised (as usual) America, Nato and the government in Kyiv, claiming that their actions had put the security of Russia itself in danger. He made references (as usual) to “Neo-Nazis” in Ukraine.

We hear that a lot from Russian officials, who regularly voice the baseless claim that Ukraine has been overrun by fascists, ultra-nationalists and Nazi sympathisers.

President Putin admitted that Russia had suffered military losses, but he gave no details.

The last official figures released by Russia’s defence ministry were 1,351 Russian soldiers killed. But that was six weeks ago. There has been no update since.

Curiously, Putin didn’t employ his familiar phrase "special military operation" to describe Russia’s offensive. Neither did he call it a war. But he tried to draw parallels between current hostilities and World War Two - an attempt, perhaps, to mobilise patriotic sentiment over Hitler’s defeat to boost support amongst the Russian public for the invasion of Ukraine.

The Kremlin had been expecting a swift victory in Ukraine, possibly within days of sending in troops. It didn’t happen. Many here believe Vladimir Putin’s Plan B was to secure a victory by 9 May. That hasn’t happened either.

Where does President Putin go from here? There were few clues in today’s speech. But there was no signalling of an end to hostilities.

Read more here

Image source, Reuters

If you're just joining us or need a recap, here are some of today's main developments in the Ukraine war:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has told a huge military parade in Moscow's Red Square that troops in eastern Ukraine are "defending the motherland"
• Putin was speaking as Russia celebrates Victory Day - a public holiday marking the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War
• Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has also marked the day, telling Russia it can't appropriate victory in WW2. "We won then. We will win now," he said
• The UK's Ministry of Defence says Russia has been forced to use ageing and less reliable weapons as its stockpile of precision-guided munitions runs out
• Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has used Victory Day to call on Russia's leader to end the war in Ukraine immediately

Image source, EPA

Russian forces are running out of precision weapons fairly quickly and could be "broken" by Ukraine, the UK defence secretary says.

Speaking in London, Ben Wallace says: "We all have highly complex weapons that, funny enough, don't take a couple of days to replace, it can take months. Once you fire them all in the way Russia has done, they have a real challenge."

He says Putin will find trying to replace those weapons "incredibly hard", adding that a lot of the components come from the West and he won't be able to get hold of them.

"It is not inconceivable that large superpowers, as such, as he thinks he is, lose on the battlefield," Wallace says. "It is very possible that Ukraine will break the Russian army."

He says it is "absurd" that today's parade in Moscow lacks any sense of culpability or "facing-up to the reality of what's happened to Russia's reputation, but also the Russian soldiers... and what they've been doing to their Ukrainian brothers and sisters".

Asked what defeat for Russia would look like, Wallace says: "Putin must fail in Ukraine is obviously our key policy mission, but you know we mustn't avoid the fundamentals here, which is it is for Ukraine to choose how it ends this conflict - or how it makes Russia end this conflict - and in what manner."

Olga Ivshina
BBC News Russian

Image source, KZN.RU

Victory Day parades are taking place not only in Moscow but across Russia, too.

In larger cities it is mostly the soldiers marching, in smaller cities and towns schoolchildren and university students are joining processions, dressed up in military uniforms.

In many places there are people dressed up in uniforms of the style worn by the Red Army in 1945. For many Russians, especially in the regions, Victory Day is not only the time to commemorate the fallen in World War Two but to mourn the collapse of the Soviet Union as the holiday turns into a show of nostalgia for Soviet greatness.

Life in the USSR wasn’t easy for most Soviet people but it was stable and predictable. It was followed by the chaos and economic instability of the late 1980s Perestroika and the post-Soviet 1990s. Stability is what many Russians of the older generation appear to miss.

But the big difference this year is the commemoration of those killed not 80 years ago, but only a few weeks or days ago.

The Russian authorities are encouraging ordinary people to intertwine celebration of victory in World War Two with commemorating Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. Some of the new war veterans took part in the parade on Red Square while in the regions the portraits of soldiers who've died recently are on display.

Sarah Rainsford
BBC Eastern Europe Correspondent, Kyiv

Vladimir Putin’s talk of Russia’s ‘righteous fight’ sounds extremely hollow to Ukrainians.

The siege of Mariupol has reduced the port city to ruins, not "liberated" it.

Civilians are fleeing intense fighting in the east or dying taking shelter, even in schools.

And around Ukraine’s capital, the roads are still lined with the carcasses of Russian tanks that failed to take Kyiv.

Moscow completely miscalculated.

The scale of destruction along the approaches to Kyiv is breathtaking: businesses, homes, petrol stations burned and smashed to the ground.

And if you turn off the highways into any village, people share harrowing stories of the brutality of those soldiers who rode in on tanks and APCs firing indiscriminately, then looted and ransacked homes.

In many cases, backed by clear evidence, they also kidnapped, beat and executed unarmed civilians.

Mr Putin told his troops today that they were fighting so that “no one forgets the lessons of World War Two”, mirroring the heroism of Soviet troops and battling so that “there is no place for executioners, punishers and Nazis in the world".

That’s no ‘parallel reality’, as some have taken to terming it - it couldn’t be further from the truth that we and others are documenting every day on the ground.

Paul Adams
BBC Diplomatic correspondent

Image source, EPA

Ukraine has fought back in a way the Kremlin cannot have anticipated, and the West’s reaction – in terms of sanctions and military support for Ukraine – has also come as an unpleasant surprise.

President Putin wasted no time getting back to the narrative he outlined just as this war began: that Russia was asking for dialogue about European security last December, but was rebuffed. And that Ukraine was preparing military operations in the Donbas and talking openly about the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

He accused the West of preparing to invade Russian territory, making clear he meant Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

There was a time, around the turn of the year, when a dialogue about European security did seem possible. But it turns out that all the while Vladimir Putin was preparing for war. In Kyiv, there were no preparations for offensive operations in the Donbas – something that would have been suicidal, given the vast array of Russian forces ranged just across the border. As for nuclear weapons, there is not a shred of truth in this allegation.

Vitaliy Shevchenko
BBC Monitoring Russia analyst

As we've been reporting, there were no major announcements in Vladmir Putin's Victory Day speech. But it was unusual for two reasons compared to what normally happens on 9 May. It was firmly focused on the now (normally he speaks about the victory in 1945) and it was longer than normal (the speech lasted just five minutes last year).

But the Russian leader's key message was simple and clear - we need to fight Ukraine because they're neo-Nazis and we need to finish what our forefathers started by defeating Nazi Germany.

Hugo Bachega
Reporting from Dnipro

Image source, Reuters

Absent in Putin’s speech was the word Mariupol. The city, of great strategic significance for Russia, has seen some of the fiercest fighting in this war, and is also another symbol of Ukrainian resistance against the invading forces.

The final battle for the city is being fought in the sprawling Azovstal steelworks, where Ukrainian fighters are holed up in underground tunnels and bunkers, surrounded by Russian troops.

In a post on Telegram, an adviser to the city’s mayor said Russian forces had started storming the plant after the departure of a humanitarian convoy carrying the remaining civilians from the site, a claim that could not be independently verified.

On Sunday, in an extraordinary news conference broadcast live from a bunker in the complex, two fighters pledged to keep on fighting, saying they would not surrender.

"We don't have high chances of survival if we’re captured," one of them said. "We are basically dead men. Most of us know this. It's why we fight so fearlessly."

Capturing Mariupol would allow Russia to create a land bridge between the eastern areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, parts of which were controlled by Russian-backed separatists before this invasion started, and the Crimea peninsula, invaded and annexed by Russia in 2014.

Jonathan Marcus
Defence analyst

Image source, EPA

Today's parade was a much-reduced display of Russia’s military might, as the authorities in Moscow had indicated it would be.

Nonetheless many of the weapons systems currently in action in Ukraine were represented, from self-propelled artillery, to ground-launched ballistic missiles and heavy armour.

Contingents from all of the main branches of the Russian military were represented including combat vehicles and soldiers from the VDV – Russia’s paratroop formations, who were in the vanguard of its assault on Ukraine, and who suffered significant casualties in the first weeks of the war.

Long-range nuclear missiles were also trundled through Red Square – a potent reminder of Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal – a threat that Russian leaders have referred to more than once as this conflict has developed into an attritional struggle with only limited Russian gains.

Image source, .

More now on UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace's speech in London. He also accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of making "fairytale claims", including suggesting Nato was preparing to attack Russia.

In comments made afterwards, Wallace said: "President Putin has made a number of fairytale claims for months and years now... If it wasn't so tragic it would be amusing, but it isn't.

"One of his claims is that he is surrounded. Nato accounts for 6% of his land border. That's not being surrounded if only 6% of your land border is Nato countries.

"He claimed that there were Nato bases in Ukraine and I'm sure the Ukrainian ambassador will tell you there weren't any Nato bases in Ukraine.

"I think he is believing what he wants to believe - a slight shine of desperation. But let me put on the record categorically: Nato, Britain, eastern Europe is not planning to invade Russia and never has done."

No real clues as to Putin's next stepspublished at 09:56 British Summer Time 9 May 2022

09:56 BST 9 May 2022

Paul Adams
BBC Diplomatic correspondent

Image source, Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel

Russian President Vladimir Putin may have derived some satisfaction from all the fevered Western speculation surrounding this year’s Victory Day speech.

But despite the predictable linking of today’s war in Ukraine with the fight against Nazism in the Second World War, he gave no real clues to his future intentions.

No talk of mobilisation. No declarations of victory in Ukraine. A reference to casualties, but no change in terminology: this is still a “special military operation”, not a war.

Is Putin happy to keep everyone guessing, or does the lack of detail reflect Russia’s setbacks on the battlefield?

There have been achievements. Russia has taken territory and inflicted terrible damage on Ukraine.

But given the scale of the invasion back in February, this operation has singularly failed to achieve Moscow’s central objective: the defeat of Ukraine and the removal of its leadership.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says Vladimir Putin is trying to intimidate the world with his military parade in Moscow.

The parade marks the World War Two victory over the Nazis, but Wallace says Putin and his inner circle are mirroring the tyranny of fascism.

In a speech at the National Army Museum in London, Wallace said: "Really what President Putin wants is the Russian people and the world to be awed and intimidated by the ongoing memorial to militarism.

"I believe the ongoing and unprovoked conflict in Ukraine does nothing but dishonour those same soldiers."

Image source, Reuters