Russia said it would scale down fighting around two Ukrainian cities following “meaningful” talks with Ukraine yesterday, as officials raised the prospect of a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents.

Russia’s Wagner Group has deployed its mercenaries to eastern Ukraine, the UK’s ministry of defence said Monday, adding that over 1,000 would likely take part in fighting following Russian setbacks.

Russia promised at peace talks on Tuesday to scale down its military operations around Kyiv and northern Ukraine, while Ukraine proposed adopting a neutral status but with international guarantees that it would be protected from attack.

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Turkey on Tuesday for the first face-to-face talks in nearly three weeks, with Ukraine seeking a ceasefire without compromising on territory or sovereignty as its forces have pushed Russians back from Kyiv.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Friday added Russia's AO Kaspersky Lab, China Telecom (Americas) Corp and China Mobile International USA to its list of communications equipment and service providers deemed threats to US national security.

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning earlier this month after a meeting in Kyiv, the Wall Street Journal and the investigative outlet Bellingcat reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Nearly 5,000 people have been killed in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol since Russian forces laid siege to it, a spokesperson for the city mayor said on Monday.

New fires have broken out in the exclusion zone around the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which is occupied by Russian forces, according to Ukrainian authorities.

Ukraine is willing to become neutral and compromise over the status of the eastern Donbass region as part of a peace deal, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday, even as another top Ukrainian official accused Russia of aiming to carve the country in two.

Russia's communications watchdog told Russian media on Sunday to refrain from reporting an interview done with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and said it had started a probe into the outlets which had interviewed the Ukrainian leader.

Russia wants to split Ukraine into two, as happened with North and South Korea, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief said yesterday, vowing “total” guerrilla warfare to prevent a carve up of the country.

Nearly half of Ukrainians aged 18-55 are ready to fight to defend their country against Russia, a poll conducted by a Norwegian research centre suggested on Saturday.

The United Nations human rights office said on Sunday that 1,119 civilians had so far been killed and 1,790 wounded since Russia began its attack on Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has urged the West to give Ukraine tanks, planes and missiles to fend off Russian forces as his government said Moscow's forces were targeting the country's fuel and food depots.

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power" in a fiery speech pushing the world's democracies to unite to support Ukraine, though the White House later said Biden was not calling for regime change in Moscow.

US President Joe Biden met top Ukrainian ministers in an emphatic show of support yesterday, as Russia signalled it may scale down its war aims after failing to break Kyiv’s resistance in a month of fighting and deadly attacks on civilians.

The Russian army on Friday updated its losses in Ukraine to 1,351 soldiers, while saying that it had evacuated more than 400,000 civilians and condemning Western supplies of weapons to Kyiv.

The war in Ukraine has killed 136 children in the 31 days since the start of the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s office of the prosecutor general said on Saturday in a message on the Telegram app.

Two rocket strikes hit Ukraine's western city of Lviv on Saturday, wounding five people, regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyy said, after local authorities told residents to seek shelter in the wake of powerful blasts on the city's outskirts.

Russian forces have taken control of a town where workers at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant live, the governor of Kyiv region said on Saturday, and fighting was reported in the streets of the besieged southern port of Mariupol.