Fighting raged Saturday for Ukraine's strategic Lysychansk, as Kyiv denied a claim by Moscow-backed separatists that they had encircled the eastern city.

Clashes have been intense in Lysychansk, the last major city in the Luhansk region of the Donbas still in Ukrainian hands, located across the river from neighbouring Severodonetsk seized by Russia

Sweeping Western sanctions are only hastening integration between Russia and Belarus, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday.

Western countries levied several rounds of sanctions on both Moscow and Minsk in retaliation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, with Belarus accused of acting as a staging ground for Russia’s incursion into

The UN's cultural agency on Friday inscribed the culture surrounding beetroot soup known as borshch in Ukraine on its list of endangered cultural heritage, a recognition sought urgently by Kviv after its invasion by neighboring Russia.

Ukraine prizes borshch, a nourishing soup with beetroot as its base, as a national dish even though it is also