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Scores of civilians are feared dead or seriously injured after a Russian rocket strike hit a crowded shopping centre in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, officials have said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Telegram post that the number of victims was “unimaginable”, citing reports that more than 1,000 civilians were inside at the time of the attack.

Today marks one full year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began and fears remain that it could last for another.

A camera pans slowly around a modestly comfortable living room. Here is the kitchen corner, with its microwave, coffee machine and jars of newly preserved tomatoes. Here are the inherited cabinets, one full of the best china, one full of books. And now, here is a wall that doesn’t exist any more. Torn plaster and broken wood frames a vast portal to the rolling steppes. There is a single road across those grasslands. It leads to Russia.

China still has much to gain from its current relationship with Russia even as the invasion of Ukraine drags on, turning Russia into an international pariah and threatening to rub off on China’s reputation as well.  "China has, in effect, doubled down on its support for the Putin war effort, and we saw this, for instance, last month when China's third rank leader went to Moscow, spoke to the State Duma, and in very clear terms, expressed Beijing's support for Russia," Gordon Change, author of "The Coming Collapse of China," told Fox News Digital.  "Then, [we] see Jinping himself when he was in Uzbekistan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, actually confirmed that endorsement," Chang added. "The only conclusion that we can come to is that Beijing is not backing away from Russia."  The China and Russia dynamic has remained a troubling one for the United States since even before the invasion of Ukraine started in March 2022.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Hard-hitting documentaries centering on some of the world’s most critical geopolitical flashpoints have proved hot sellers for Java Films. The Paris and London-based distributor closed a number of deals this week at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous TV market in Biarritz for provocative works that examine life in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian city of Gaza, the causes of the Ukraine war, and rising tensions between the U.S. and China over the vital supply of semiconductors. Chiara Avesani and Matteo Delbò’s “Erasmus in Gaza” follows Riccardo, an Italian final-year medical student who wants to be a trauma surgeon and travels to war-torn Gaza on an Erasmus exchange program in order to receive battlefield training and write his thesis on explosive bullet wounds. The young medic is not prepared for the brutality of war, however.

Boris Johnson has reportedly arrived in Kyiv for a surprise visit to Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Two British soldiers captured whilst fighting in Ukraine have been 'sentenced to death' and are now set to face a firing squad it has been reported.

The major prize-winners at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival have yet to be announced, but there is no question about which film is the most important. “Butterfly Vision” doesn’t just have the distinction of being one of the two Ukrainian productions on display (the other being Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s “Pamfir”), it also tells a story about the effects of warfare both on Ukraine’s soldiers and the citizens who have waited for them back home. It is almost incredible that Maksym Nakonechnyi was able to finish “Butterfly Vision” and to bring it to Cannes, where he made a touching speech about the risk of Ukrainian culture being extinguished.

Lise Pedersen As the boundaries in cinema become increasingly fluid, emerging filmmakers whose films have been selected at the Cannes Film Festival have been discussing their journey from documentary to fiction at the Cannes Market’s Cannes Docs sidebar.Curated by the Documentary Assn. of Europe, the panel on Sunday brought together Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi, the director of Un Certain Regard title “Butterfly Vision,” and Erige Sehiri (“Railway Men”), the Tunisian director of “Under the Fig Leaves,” which had its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.The titles are fiction debuts for Nakonechnyi and Sehiri, who are both experienced documentary filmmakers.Inspired by the conflict in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas region that has been ongoing since 2014, “Butterfly Vision” is the story of a young Ukrainian soldier who returns home after being held captive for months and discovers she is pregnant after being raped by her Russian warden.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticCanadian filmmaker and photographer Louie Palu’s “Zero Position” offers a stark snapshot of war’s devastation in Eastern Ukraine. Shot in 2016, well before the current invasion but at a point when Russia-allied separatists had already occupied much of the Donbas region, this impressionistic documentary does not provide much in the way of contextualizing explanation, let alone political analysis.

Dozens of people have reportedly been killed in a rocket strike on an eastern Ukrainian train station used for evacuating civilians. More than 30 people have been killed and dozens injured in the Donetsk region, in the city of Kramatorsk, when two rockets hit the station, according to the head of Ukraine’s railways Olexander Kamyshin.

Lise Pedersen “Novorossiya” by Enrico Parenti and Luca Gennari, which had its world premiere this week at CPH:DOX, is a rare film that shows the ongoing conflict in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas region from the Russian perspective.Gennari, an experienced cinematographer, was shocked at the way the war in the Luhansk and Donetsk region, where pro-Russian separatists have proclaimed the state of Novorossiya (literally “New Russia”), no longer received any media attention once the Maidan revolution was over.In 2017, he decided to head to the Donbas region with his camera to see what life was like there.The film follows the parallel stories of a handful of characters, ranging from a communist U.S. fighter from Texas to a young Ukrainian soldier, a captain in the separatist army who dreams of rebuilding the Soviet Union, an opera singer from the Donetsk opera house, two young men from a heavy metal band and two elderly women who live in a bunker.

A Thornhill-based landmine clearing charity has spoken of its concern for aid workers based in Ukraine.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Documentaries about the conflict in Ukraine, the Cuban migrant situation and the Palestinian refugee crisis were among top winners at MiradasDoc, Spain’s foremost documentary film festival which wrapped its 15th edition on March 12. Based in Tenerife, Canary Islands, the festival was an in-person event running March 4-12, while its market (March 8-11) remained virtual for the second consecutive year.The best international documentary prize went to “Option Zero” (“La Opcion Cero”) by Cuban filmmaker Marcel Beltran while the best debut feature award was extended to “Trenches” by French journalist Loup Bureau who has covered the Arab Spring in Egypt, the Syrian War and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the Donbas region. “Trenches” follows the intrepid young men and women who are fighting Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Ukraine intensified Tuesday as the Cannes Film Festival said no Russian delegations would be welcome this year and the Venice festival announced free screenings of a film about the 2014 conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.The announcements by Europe's two premier film festivals came on the heels of other high-profile protests in the arts, including Hollywood's decision to pull films scheduled for release in Russia and the Munich Philharmonic's decision to fire chief conductor Valery Gergiev. The orchestra, joined by other orchestras and festivals linked to Gergiev, cited his support for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his refusal to reject the invasion.Cannes, which is scheduled for May, is the most global of film festivals and its international village of flag-waving pavilions annually hosts more than 80 countries from around the world.In a statement, festival organizers said the ban on any official Russian delegation or individuals linked to the Kremlin would remain “unless the war of assault ends in conditions that will satisfy the Ukrainian people.”The festival didn’t rule out accepting films from Russia.

Manchester City footballer Oleksandr Zinchenko embraced with Everton player Vitaliy Mykolenko as their teams went head to head in a Premier League match on Saturday 26 February after their homeland of Ukraine was invaded by Russia. Oleksandr, 25, who is now reportedly on £20,00 a week at Manchester City, lives in the affluent village of Hale Barns near Altrincham in Greater Manchester, with his TV presenter and journalist wife Vlada Shcheglova along with their six month old daughter.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are speaking out about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On Thursday, the couple released a brief statement on their Archewell Foundation website, titled: «We stand with the people of Ukraine.»«Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and all of us at Archewell stand with the people of Ukraine against this breach of international and humanitarian law and encourage the global community and its leaders to do the same,» reads the statement.The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are able to make such a declaration after officially stepping down from their roles as working members of the royal family last year. Royals usually do not comment on current events or politics, and no other member of the British royal family has publicly reacted to the situation in Ukraine and Russia.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentIn the wake of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Danish producer Monica Hellström (“Flee”) and Sundance-winning helmer Simon Lereng Wilmont have joined forces to orchestrate the evacuation of some of the subjects portrayed in their Oscar-shortlisted documentary “The Distant Barking of Dogs.”Hellström told Variety that she and Lereng Wilmont quickly enlisted the help of their assistant director and local production coordinator to evacuate Oleg Afanasyev and his grandmother Alexandra, the protagonists of “The Distant Barking of Dogs,” from their war-torn village of Hnutove in Donetsk. The news was first reported by the website Nordic Film and TV News.Meanwhile, the children at the shelter that was the focus of “A House Made of Splinters,” which just earned Lereng Wilmont a best director award at Sundance last month, have also been evacuated to a safer area after facing a bombing threat.

Russia has launched more than 80 strikes against Ukrainian targets today, the UK's Ministry of Defence has said.

according to NATO officials. The late-night attack began moments after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he had «decided to conduct a special military operation» to protect eastern Ukraine's Donbas region.CBS News correspondents reported hearing loud blasts in the capital city, Kyiv, and in the eastern city of Kharkiv.In his speech on Russian state TV, Putin said his plans did not include an occupation of Ukraine.The attack came just two days after Putin recognized the self-declared «People's Republics» of Donetsk and Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, as independent, sending shockwaves across the globe and a new round of sanctions from the West.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he was launching a “special military operation” to the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, warning that country’s soldiers to lay down their arms.

ITV News crashed during its lunchtime programme leaving some viewers pondering whether the channel had fallen victim to a 'cyber attack'.

JD Linville On the Eastern border of Ukraine in the Donbas region is the city of Lysychansk, only 90 kilometers from Lugansk, where along the bank of the Donets lies the Lysychansk Center for the Social and Psychological Rehabilitation of Children.This halfway house serves as a momentary intervention for neglected and at-risk children while the state decides where to place them. It is there that director Simon Lereng Wimont, who was shortlisted for an Oscar with his last film “The Distant Barking of Dogs,” filmed his new documentary “A House Made of Splinters” which will world premiere at Sundance in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.Cinephil is handling world sales for the film.